Acta Poloniae Historica
119, 2019
PL ISSN 0001–6829
Wojtek Jezierski
ST ADALBERTUS DOMESTICUS.
PATTERNS OF MISSIONING AND EPISCOPAL POWER
IN POLAND AND SCANDINAVIA IN THE ELEVENTH
TO THIRTEENTH CENTURIES*
What a country, thought Szacki. No original songs –
nothing but covers and adaptations. How can things
possibly be normal here?
Zygmunt Miłoszewski, Grain of Truth1
Abstract
This article explores the ways episcopal milieus on the north-eastern peripheries
of Europe created and renewed their identities and symbols of episcopal authority
by domesticating their immigrant saints during the high Middle Ages. By comparing the examples of holy bishops arriving to Poland and Sweden (St Adalbert,
St Sigfrid, St Henry), it studies the episcopal mythopoesis, that is, the creation of
foundational myths and mythologies as well as their adaptation to specific local
needs and changing historical circumstances. The article further probes to what
extent these mythopoetic efforts were original or imitative in comparison to the
Western European episcopal centres and other peripheries. How similarly or differently did the bishops in the “old” and “young” Europe respond to the question:
What beginnings do we need today? And what role did the appropriation, commodification, and domestication of holy bishops’ images and body parts play in
building the institutional identities of bishoprics?
* This research was funded by the National Science Centre, Poland, as part of
grant no. 2015/17/B/HS3/00502.
I would like to thank Roman Michałowski, Grzegorz Pac, Cordelia Heß, Miłosz
Sosnowski, Marcin R. Pauk, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on the earlier drafts of this article. I am also indebted to Erik Goosmann, Mayke
de Jong, Rob Meens, Janneke Raaijmakers for their comments and kind invitation
to present this study at the Utrecht Centre of Medieval Studies in February 2019.
1
In the original: Zygmunt Miłoszewski, Ziarno prawdy: “Co za kraj, pomyślał
Szacki. Nic tylko covery i przeróbki. Jak tu ma być normalnie?”.
http://dx.doi.org/10.12775/APH.2019.119.12
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Wojtek Jezierski
Keywords: episcopal relics, mythopoesis, secondary mythologization, domestication,
St Adalbert of Prague, St Sigfrid, St Henry of Finland, Gniezno
I
INTRODUCTION
This study focuses on the relationship between the most important
Polish saint, St Adalbert/Vojtěch/Wojciech of Prague, and his successors
in Gniezno as expressed in the hagiographical tradition concerning the
holy man developed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By studying
selected patterns of the episcopal power and missioning expressed in
this tradition, also in comparison with examples from Scandinavia, this
article explores the ways episcopal milieus in European peripheries
created and renewed their identities and authority by domesticating
their immigrant saints and exploiting them for resources such as claims
of ancient lineage, fama, miracles, protection, and attractiveness in the
eyes of the local population. In other words, these examples will be
explored as episcopal mythopoesis, that is, the creation of foundational
myths and mythologies as well as their adaptation to specific local
needs and changing historical circumstances.2
Such occasional or cyclical necessity to reinvigorate and revise
one’s beginnings was by no means a predicament unique to episcopal
milieus on the outskirts of Latin Christendom. Old, well-established
episcopal sees in the West also sometimes sought to boost their
authority and supremacy over their competitors in the bidding game of
political influence in the Church, particularly by antedating the origins
of the cities and dioceses over which they presided, or by inventing
previously unheard-of connections to ancient saints. Famously, in the
course of the tenth century the energetic archbishops of Trier created
a wholly new and quite fantastic account of the history of their diocese.
It essentially claimed that their city had been founded before Rome
and that the dignity of its pontiffs was directly instituted by St Peter,
who personally ordained the city’s patron saints and first pontiff –
St Eucharius, and his helpers, St Valerius and St Martenus. This ancient
Lars Boje Mortensen, ‘Sanctified Beginnings and Mythopoetic Moments. The
First Wave of Writing on the Past in Norway, Denmark, and Hungary, c. 1000–1230’
in Lars Boje Mortensen (ed.), The Making of Christian Myths in the Periphery of Latin
Christendom (c. 1000–1300) (Copenhagen, 2006), 249–73.
2
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
211
distinction was not only confirmed by a papal bull of 969 – itself based
on a forged bull created in Trier – and materially embodied by the
baculus (staff) of St Peter encapsulated in a lavish reliquary created
for that occasion. The message was clear: Trier was an apostolic,
Petrine church and should thus enjoy primacy over other churches in
both Germany and Gaul, as well as other special political privileges.3
Notwithstanding the validity or success of such claims, nevertheless
certain geographical, chronological, and thematic limits seemed to
exist as to how fantastical the arguments bishops in need of authority
could lever to support such genealogies. Broadly speaking, it has
been suggested that in the tenth to twelfth centuries bishops in the
West – those presiding either over time-honoured or up-and-coming
sees – placed their bets on apostolic traditions and Roman lineages.
By comparison, their counterparts in the north-eastern peripheries of
Europe, to which Christendom expanded around and after the year
1000, had roughly two ways for creating mythopoesis on the backs of
their patron saints: either by building on the missionary and martyr
identities of their founders, or through sanctification of their rulers.
The latter strategy, so popular for instance in Norway, Denmark,
Hungary, Bohemia, or Rus’, was conducted in concert with the ruling
families, whose ancestors were utilized as a means of legitimacy.4
Roman Michałowski, ‘Ranga stolic biskupich we wczesnym średniowieczu i jej
podstawy sakralne. Wybrane zagadnienia’, in Aneta Pieniądz-Skrzypczak and Jerzy
Pysiak (eds.), Sacrum: Obraz i funkcja w społeczeństwie średniowiecznym (Warszawa,
2005), 191–203; Cynthia Hahn, ‘What Do Reliquaries Do for Relics?’, Numen, 57
(2010), 284–316, here 284–288; more generally: Timothy Reuter, ‘A Europe of
Bishops. The Age of Wulfstan of York and Burchard of Worms’, in Ludger Körntgen
and Dominik Wassenhoven (eds.), Patterns of episcopal power: bishops in tenth and
eleventh century western Europe / Strukturen bischöflicher Herrschaftsgewalt im westlichen
Europa des 10. und 11. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2011), 17–38; see also Franceso Veronese,
‘Foreign Bishops Using Local Saints. The Passio et translation sanctorum Firmi et Rustici
(BHL 3020–1) and Carolingian Verona’, in Michele C. Ferrari (ed.), Saints and the
City: Beiträge zum Verständnis urbaner Sakralität in christlichen Gemeinschaften (5.–17. Jh.)
(Erlangen, 2015), 85–114.
4
Michałowski, ‘Ranga stolic biskupich’, passim; Grzegorz Pac, ‘Problem świętości
władców we wczesnym i pełnym średniowieczu – przypadek Polski na tle europejskim’, Historia Slavorum Occidentis, 2 (2016), 90–121; Norbert Kersken, ‘God and
the Saints in Medieval Polish Historiography’, in Mortensen (ed.), The Making of
Christian Myths, 123–94; Gábor Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic
Cults in Medieval Central Europe, trans. Éva Pálmai (Cambridge, 2002); Robert Bartlett,
Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the
3
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Wojtek Jezierski
The scale of these mythopoetic ambitions was different too: on those
peripheries the responsibility and prerogatives of the patron saints
often encompassed entire polities and kingdoms, which was seldom
the case in the West. But even if the past may have been invented
differently beyond the Roman limes, bishops in both “old” and “young”
Europe had to regularly answer the same question: what beginnings
do we need today?
The case of how this question was answered by the Polish religiopolitical culture between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, where
no holy rulers were found, stands out against both the western and
north-eastern European background. The patronage of the country
was here provided by the relationship between the Piast dynasty, the
Gniezno archbishopric, and their immigrant patron saint, St Adalbert
of Prague. In fact, in some respects the cult of St Adalbert can be
interpreted as an example of a competing way of association with the
saint, in this case concerning the tension between the ruling secular
elites and their ecclesiastical partners. It is thus worth exploring
how this competition played out, and how the cults of saints were
used to boost the institutional authority and political legitimacy in
the Polish and other north-eastern peripheries vis-à-vis the apostolic
trends in the West.
The main focus of this study rests on two high medieval texts which
seem to have been a way to reinvigorate the cult of St Adalbert by
retelling the story of his missionary efforts, martyrdom, and stressing
the importance of his episcopal dignity anew. These two late vitae of
St Adalbert: the twelfth-century Tempore illo and its thirteenth-century
abbreviated reworking, the Miracula Sancti Adalberti, were local adaptations of the first two hagiographies of the saint penned at the turn
of the millennium: Vita prior and Vita altera. It should be noted that
Reformation (Princeton, 2013), 227–33; for recent studies on the creation of saints
on the north-eastern peripheries of Europe, see particularly: Haki Antonsson and
Ildar H. Garipzanov (eds.), Saints and Their Lives on the Periphery: Veneration of Saints
in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe (c. 1000–1200) (Turnhout, 2010); Carsten Selch
Jensen, Kurt Villads Jensen, Tuomas M. Lethonen, Nils Holger Petersen, and Tracey R.
Sands (eds.), Saints and Sainthood Around the Baltic Sea: Identity, Literacy, and Communication in the Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, 2018); Carl Phelpstead, ‘Canonizing Kings:
Nordic Royal Hagiography as Legitimation and Glorification’, in Wojtek Jezierski,
Kim Esmark, Hans Jacob Orning, and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (eds.), Nordic Elites in
Transformation, c. 1050–1250, iii: Legitimacy and Glory (London, 2020), forthcoming.
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
213
in the Polish religious political culture of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries St Adalbert did not represent a foreign element; saints
were notoriously vagrant and their outsider status was no obstacle
for local annexation. Still, the Tempore and the Miracula should be
seen as essentially home-grown takes on an immigrant saint with
a hagiography hitherto composed only outside Poland, and therefore
offered an opportunity to creatively adopt him to the local milieu.5
These two texts can be thus read as efforts to domesticate the saint.6
II
DOMESTICATING SAINTS
Any consideration of saints in the Middle Ages inevitably entails
studying them as objects involved in, and essentially created by, countless cultural practices. Saints and martyrs, in order to achieve their holy
status, could be slain and thus transformed into an object of veneration.
Sanctified by their killing, saints and martyrs could be appropriated in
numerous ways by being ‘consumed’ (Edward Gibbon, Gary Vikan),
abducted and stolen, cut up and circulated as commodities (Patrick J.
Geary), cursed at and humiliated (Geary, Lester K. Little) etc. To some
degree it was by virtue of all these violent practices that saints were
ascribed a position quite similar to that occupied by animals. They,
too, were seen as non-human agents that could be appropriated and
exploited, but above all used for identity-formation of human societies
as vis-à-vis, even if the holy wo/men were placed above their devotees.7
Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?, 541–6.
The domestication of saints has been explicitly suggested in Susan E. Hylen,
‘The “Domestication” of Saint Thecla: Characterization of Thecla in the Life and
Miracles of Saint Thecla’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, xxx, 2 (2014), 5–21.
Though inspirational for this article, Hylen’s view of domestication differs from
mine as she conflates taming and domestication and focuses primarily on Thecla’s
domestication through marriage and the way her hagiographers framed her relationship with St Paul to make her teaching more acceptable.
7
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Basel,
1789), vol. i, 489–90; Gary Vikan, ‘Ruminations on Edible Icons: Originals and
Copies in the Art of Byzantium’, Studies in the History of Art, 20 (1989), 47–59;
Patrick J. Geary, Furta sacra: thefts of relics in the central Middle Ages (Princeton, 1990);
Patrick J. Geary, ‘Sacred Commodities. The Circulation of Medieval Relics’, in Arjun
Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things (Cambridge, 1986), 194–218; Patrick J. Geary,
‘Humiliation of Saints’, in Stephen Nilson (ed.), Saints and their Cults. Studies in
5
6
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Wojtek Jezierski
Much like their beastly counterparts ranked below humans, medieval
saints could thus also be tamed and domesticated.
Focusing on the processes of domestication8 unavoidably implicates the question of the mutual, relational shaping of identities
between the domesticating master and the target of his efforts.9 In
this article the question of how the identities of the domesticator
(the Gniezno milieu) and its ever-present domesticate (St Adalbert)
co-evolved will be addressed by focusing on two crucial mythopoetic
moments: 1. The invention of new miracles and relics; and 2. The
(in-)hospitality shown to missionaries. Although relatively uncharted
by the previous research, these two processes and phenomena can
be counted among the crucial patterns of missioning and episcopal
authority. Needless to say, the perspective of domestication of saints
should ideally take many more types of selective pressures and adaptive
traits into account. These two foci of a symbiotic mythopoesis are
nevertheless suitable for studying how identities of saints and their
Religious Sociology, Folklore and History (Cambridge, 1983), 123–40; Lester K. Little,
Benedictine maledictions: liturgical cursing in Romanesque France (Ithaca, 1993). It is
perhaps not that surprising that on rare occasions cultural categories of saints and
animals became (con)fused, cf. Jean Claude Schmitt, The holy greyhound: Guinefort,
healer of children since the thirteenth century, trans. Martin Thom (Cambridge, 1983);
see also the medieval and postmedieval Byzantine cult of St Christopher Cynocephalus: https://www.ucc.ie/archive/milmart/Christopher.html (Accessed: 12 Dec.
2017); and more generally: Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?, 390–8.
8
Melinda A. Zeder, ‘Core questions in domestication research’, Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112 (2015), 3191–8, here:
3191: “Domestication is a sustained multigenerational, mutualistic relationship in
which one organism assumes a significant degree of influence over the reproduction
and care of another organism in order to secure a more predictable supply of
a resource of interest, and through which the partner organism gains advantage
over individuals that remain outside this relationship, thereby benefitting and
often increasing the fitness of both the domesticator and the target domesticate”.
9
Cf. Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to a Letter on Humanism’,
trans. Mary Varney Rorty, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27 (2009),
12–28; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen (Stanford, 1998), 75–80, 104–111; Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man
and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, 2004), 49–56; Jacques Derrida, The Beast
& The Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago and London, 2009), 56–7,
283–6, 297–304; Daniel L. Smail, Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley, 2007), 103–4,
147–8; Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (London, 2014),
89–107; James C. Scott, Against the Grain. A Deep History of the Earliest States (New
Haven, 2017), 18–20, 87–92, 180–2.
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
215
domesticators, St Adalbert and the Gniezno archbishops respectively,
could adapt – or sometimes fail to do so – both to each other and to
their changing cultural habitats. In other words, thematically this article
is stretched between the questions of the cult and cultivation of saints.
Adopting the perspective of domestication seems particularly
fortunate for studying the local Polish responses to an immigrant
saint such as St Adalbert. He was a Magdeburg-educated bishop of
Prague, Roman cenobite, personal friend of Emperor Otto III, and
something of a celebrity in Ottonian ecclesiastical politics.10 In fact,
already during his vagrant life Adalbert/Vojtěch displayed enough feral
and unruly behaviour – such as the abandoning of Prague without
permission – that he had to be ‘tamed’ by his superiors to reunite,
albeit without success, with his diocese and his flock. This unruliness and waywardness of the shepherd were explicitly addressed and
disarmed by his early hagiographers.11 Understandably, there are no
traces of the Gniezno milieu finding his waywardness unacceptable
or rejecting the hagiographical accounts of St Adalbert composed by
foreigners. Quite the contrary, these texts were actively perused and
adapted. This type of mutual interest and influence was more than
agreeable, as they only spread his fama throughout Europe and added
to the local promotion of the cult of the martyred bishop.
But by the twelfth century – in fact much earlier than that –
St Adalbert was considered a household saint of both the Gniezno
bishops and the Piast dynasty, and it is reasonable to ask whether
he needed to become an object of domestication at such a late point
in time? I argue that the answer to this question should, perhaps
counterintuitively, be positive. As it seems, St Adalbert might have
been losing some of his international and local flair at that point in
time and a renewed domestication of the holy man is exactly what the
Gniezno milieu opted for. Producing fresh versions of his hagiography
allowed for anchoring his cult more firmly in the local geography and
history. Such a reworking also helped in dealing with St Adalbert’s
Gerd Althoff, Otto III, trans. Phyllis G. Jestice (University Park, 2003), 69–71,
90–103, 142–5; Chris Wickham, Medieval Rome. Stability & Crisis of a City, 900–1150
(Oxford, 2015), 203, 378.
11
Miłosz Sosnowski, Studia nad wczesnymi żywotami św. Wojciecha – tradycja
rękopiśmienna i polemika środowisk (Poznań, 2013), 125–9; Roman Michałowski, ‘Święty
Wojciech – biskup reformator w Europie X wieku’, in Zbigniew Dalewski (ed.),
Granica wschodnia cywilizacji zachodniej w średniowieczu (Warszawa, 2014), 169–210.
10
216
Wojtek Jezierski
outsider status (on which the later sources insisted and creatively
explored, despite the cult’s evident historicity in Poland) in novel
ways, incorporating the posthumous fate of the saint as well as the
traditions surrounding his relics into the hagiographical accounts,
and in the process inventing new elements which served purposes
different than the original.
These processes of transformation of hagiographic traditions are
directly connected to the questions about the original and/or imitative
character of Polish medieval culture. As will be posited here, the textual
means of domestication of saints involved a re-contextualization of
the original message through quotations, employment of literary
motifs, symbols, and analogies. They also included introducing later
local traditions and accounts – sometimes made-up – into the account
of the saint’s life. This can be best demonstrated by comparing how
other authors working on the north-eastern peripheries adapted their
hagiographical material in similar circumstances in order to emphasize
the episcopal dignity of their protagonists, or to accentuate their
missionary hardships. Focusing on the similarities, differences, and
parallels that may not have been fully intended by the authors, rather
than on just the deliberate, direct influences, corresponds well with
the character of a textual culture in which imitation, likeness, and
copy were often not only considered unproblematic, but downright
desirable. As Mortensen argues, the way authors from the north-eastern
peripheries of Europe established semiotic relations between local
events and histories and their ancient and biblical equivalents or
templates was by means of contact and contiguity. They performed
these literary tasks with a selection and creativity which concurrently
celebrated and actively manipulated the inherited traditions.12
III
TEMPORE ILLO: WHEN EXACTLY?
As already mentioned, the hagiographical texts concerning St Adalbert
came in two waves. The first one brought two crucial, and wellMortensen, ‘Sanctified Beginnings’, 262–7; Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe,
‘The migration of the aura or how to explore the original through its fac similes’,
in Thomas Bartscherer and Roderick Coover (eds.) Switching Codes. Thinking Through
Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts (Chicago, 2011), 275–97.
12
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
217
explored, texts written almost immediately after the martyr’s death
in April 997. These were the Vita prior, traditionally attributed to
Johannes Canaparius, the monk and later abbot of SS. Boniface and
Alexius on the Aventine Hill in Rome, who personally met Adalbert.
The original text was composed ca 999 at the request of Otto III,
though it survives only in three later eleventh-century redactions:
the so-called Ottonian (A), Aventinian (B), and Montecassinian (C).
The second is the Vita altera by Bruno of Querfurt, composed in two
redactions, in 1004 and 1008, the latter coinciding with Bruno’s stay
in Poland.13 Although this first wave, largely based on eye-witness
accounts provided by St Adalbert’s followers, was absolutely formative for how the saint was to be later portrayed, it will receive only
limited attention in the course of this study as it does not represent
a home-grown representation of the saint and cannot thus be treated
as material for evaluating the imitative or original character of Polish
medieval culture.
This first wave was followed by a small hagiographical ripple: the
very brief Passio s. Adalperti martiris, written before 1025, traditionally referred to as the Passio from Tegernsee (Passio) after a Bavarian
Benedictine monastery holding the manuscript where the cult
of St Adalbert was practiced in the eleventh century. The Passio
appears to be an abbreviation of an unidentified larger text with
considerable overlapping with Thietmar of Merseburg’s information
about St Adalbert’s death, and takes a somewhat polemical tone
13
Jadwiga Karwasińska (ed.), ‘S. Adalbert Pragensis episcopi et martyris:
Vita prior’, Monumenta Poloniae Historica {hereinafter: MPH), Series nova, iv, 1
(Warszawa, 1962); References here are given to: Cristian Gaşpar (ed.), ‘Passio Sancti
Adalberti Martiris Christi’, in Gábor Klaniczay (ed.), Saints of the Christianization Age
of Central Europe (Tenth–Eleventh Century)/Vitae sanctorum aetatis conversionis Europae
Centralis (Saec. x–xi) (Budapest and New York, 2013), 77–181; Jadwiga Karwasińska
(ed.), ‘S. Adalberti Pragensis episcopi et martyris: Vita altera auctore Brunone
Querfurtensi’, MPH Series nova, iv, 2 (Warszawa, 1969). For the most important
secondary literature, see Cristian Gaşpar, ‘Preface’, in Klaniczay (ed.), Saints of
the Christianization Age, 79–84; Ian Wood, ‘The Hagiography of Conversion’, ibid.,
1–16; Jadwiga Karwasińska, Święty Wojciech: Wybór pism (Warszawa, 1996); Ian
Wood, The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050 (Harlow,
2001), 207–25; Gerard Labuda, Święty Wojciech: biskup-męczennik, patron Polski, Czech
i Węgier (Wrocław, 2004), 16–21; Sosnowski, Studia nad wczesnymi; Canaparius’s
authorship of the Vita prior has been put into doubt by Miłosz Sosnowski, yet for
the purposes of this study this issue remains irrelevant.
218
Wojtek Jezierski
towards Bruno’s Vita altera.14 It contains some new details about
the martyrdom of the saint as well as his first posthumous miracles,
perhaps traceable to some oral tradition surrounding the memory
of saint. This tradition might have been related to the milieu of
St Adalbert’s closest companion and the first archbishop of Gniezno,
Radim-Gaudentius, and the Benedictine community in Międzyrzecz.15
Together with the first two hagiographies (i.e. Vita prior and Vita
altera), the Passio brings a number of important elements and contains
background information from people personally acquainted with the
saint, against which his later cultivation needs to be considered.
This study, however, primarily zeroes in on the second wave of
hagiographies of St Adalbert whose anonymous authorship is traceable
to the Gniezno milieu, and which mix the information from Bruno’s
Vita and the Montecassino redaction of the Vita prior with later local
legends and invented stories surrounding the saint. Unfortunately,
in contrast to the lives by Bruno and Canaparius, whose dating is
very exact, both the Tempore illo and its later adaptation, the Miracula,
are notoriously difficult to pinpoint in time. Various attempts have
been made to place the composition of the Tempore illo from the early
twelfth to the early thirteenth century (almost definitely before 1248).
Questions were also raised about whether the text emerged as a whole
from the start, or if it is an effect of two redactions by two different
authors. Regrettably, without certain dating we can say very little
about the authorship of the Tempore illo, other than to reiterate the
current scholarly agreement generally attributing it to the cathedral
chapter in Gniezno – rather than the princely court – and with some
conceivable personal influence that the bishops exerted on the shape
of this mythopoesis. With both dating and authorship so imprecise
14
Thietmar von Merseburg, Chronicon, Robert Holzmann (ed.), Monumenta
Germaniae Historica [MGH] SRG Nova Series IX (Berlin, 1935), iv, 28 (19), 165–7;
Thietmar was Bruno’s cousin (vi, 94 (58)–95, 386–8), so he was well-acquainted
the stories surrounding St Adalbert and perhaps even knew the Vita altera: Wood,
The Missionary Life, 211–12.
15
Miłosz Sosnowski, ‘Anonimowa Passio s. Adalperti martiris (BHL 40) oraz
Wiperta Historia de predicatione episcopi Brunonis (BHL 1471b) – komentarz, edycja,
przekład’, Rocznik Biblioteki Narodowej, 43 (2012), 5–74, 22–33; Anna RutkowskaPłachcińska, ‘Pasje świętych Wojciecha i Brunona z tzw. kodeksu z Tegernsee’,
Studia Źródłoznawcze, 40 (2002), 19–37; Labuda, Święty Wojciech, 21–4; Karwasińska,
Święty Wojciech, 137–8.
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
219
there is little that can be decisively asserted about the purpose of
the Tempore illo, other than that its promotion of an updated vision
of the saint’s life, most likely aimed at renewing the relevance of the
milieu’s identification with the holy man – the very problem addressed
in this study. In addition, assuming the text’s close relation to the
episcopal milieu it has been further suggested that the Tempore illo
might have served as a scenario for the monumental bronze doors
to the Gniezno cathedral narrating the life, death, and afterlife of
the martyr, which would suggest an early dating. It should be added
for the sake of clarity that although the Gniezno doors constitute an
important source for the myth-making of St Adalbert and their imagery
is consulted and referred to, they were largely excluded from the main
focus of this investigation. This was done for the simple reason that
the doors do not depict any of the scenes or episodes from the saint’s
life studied here, which in itself is quite significant and explicitly
addressed below.16
The other text in this second wave, the Miracula sancti Adalberti, has
been dated roughly in the thirteenth century, most likely in its second
half (before 1295, that is, before King Przemysł II’s ascension to the
Polish throne, ending the feudal fragmentation of the country). It is
a compilation of the life and miracles of St Adalbert excerpted from
the Tempore illo, though containing a number of telling precisions,
elucidations, and additions from other sources, for instance, a short
description of the Gniezno summit. It has been suggested that the
Miracula’s formal character and standardized division between vita,
miracula, and translatio might be the effect of the text being modelled on
the Miracula St Stanislai, prepared for the canonization of the Cracowian
martyr bishop in 1253.17 For the purposes of this study, rather than
taking an arbitrary stance on the dating of these two texts, I will treat
16
‘De sancto Adalberto episcopo’, Max Perlbach (ed.), MGH SS xv, 2 (Hannover,
1888), 1178–84; Labuda, Święty Wojciech, 33–6; Helena Chłopocka, ‘Wstęp’, in Jan
Andrzej Spież (ed.), W kręgu żywotów św. Wojciecha (Kraków, 1997), 175–7; Ryszard
Grzesik, ‘“Tempore illo”, dwunastowieczny polski żywot św. Wojciecha’, Rocznik
Gdański, lvii (1997), 57–74; Tomasz Ginter, ‘Wątki hagiograficzne św. Wojciecha
w ikonografii Drzwi Gnieźnieńskich’, Kwartalnik Historyczny, cviii (2001), 17–46.
17
‘Miracula sancti Adalberti’, Wojciech Kętrzyński (ed.), MPH, iv (Lviv, 1883),
26–38; Labuda, Święty Wojciech, 36–7; Marian Plezia, ‘Wstęp’, in Spież (ed.), W kręgu
żywotów św. Wojciecha, 201–2; Aleksandra Witkowska, ‘Miracula średniowieczne.
Forma przekazu i możliwości badawcze’, Studia Zródłoznawcze, xxii (1977), 183–7.
220
Wojtek Jezierski
both as ridden with the temporal uncertainty principle, so to speak;
the former roughly from the twelfth-century, and the latter roughly
from the thirteenth-century. It is more fruitful to consider, within
these parameters, what consequences an earlier or later dating of those
works would have for the problems studied here.
IV
DISMEMBERING & REMEMBERING:
CUIUS CORPUS, EIUS AUCTORITAS
The fate of the physical remains of St Adalbert in the eleventh and
early twelfth centuries, judged against the belatedness of his homegrown hagiography, strongly suggests that the primary cultivators and
domesticators of the saint were not the Gniezno bishops but the Piast
ruling elite. Already the first two lives Vita prior (C) and Vita altera,
as well as the Passio from Tegernsee focused on the posthumous fate of
the head and the rest of the body of the martyr: from the decapitation
through to bringing of the head to Duke Bolesław I Chrobry/the Brave;
the latter’s purchase of the corpse and to its transfer (translatio) to
Gniezno. Understandably, the medieval authors paid special attention
to the many journeys of the head of St Adalbert: from the furtum sacrum
of his remains to Prague by Duke Břetislav I’s troops, who invaded
Gniezno in 1039 to carry it off to Prague (appropriation or domestication by other means), through to the head’s miraculous recovery in
1127 (in Gniezno) and 1143 (in Prague), and to its travels until the
Middle Ages.18 This privileging of the martyr’s caput was particularly
visible in the high and late medieval legends, in which narrations about
the miraculous journeys of the head were used as a way to establish
specific cult places in Poland and abroad, which well represents the
traditional traits of Central and Western European hagiography.19
There is no doubt that the Piasts actively used the saint’s severed
members as material carriers of imagination and a means for spreading
Martin Wihoda, První česká království (Prague, 2015), 91–4.
Elżbieta Dąbrowska, ‘Pierwotne miejsce pochowania i recepcja relikwii świętego
Wojciecha we wczesnym średniowieczu’, in eadem, Groby, relikwie i insygnia: Studia
z dziejów mentalności średniowiecznej (Warszawa, 2008),. 251–62, here 257–8; Masza
Sitek, ‘The Threefold Movement of St Adalbert’s Head’, Mediaevistik, 29 (2016),
143–74; Maria Starnawska, Świętych życie po życiu. Relikwie w kulturze religijnej na
ziemiach polskich w średniowieczu (Warszawa, 2008), 67–92.
18
19
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
221
their own reputation through his cult – in itself a claim of ownership
inherent to domestication. An oft-cited example is the episode reported
in one of the many redactions and interpolations to the chronicle by
the Aquitanian author, Adémar de Chabannes (composed c 1030). In
1000, that is three years after St Adalbert’s death, Otto III supposedly
set out to exhume the body of Charlemagne from under the floor
of the Aachen cathedral. The Emperor had no clue where to look,
however. After three days he received a vision of the fully adorned
Emperor of the Franks, who pointed out a particular spot on the floor
to excavate. Among the objects Otto III found there was a golden
throne, which he sent to Bolesław I the Brave.20 In exchange “King
Bolesław, having accepted the gift, sent the emperor the arm from
body of the said saint [St Adalbert], which he received joyfully”. In
addition Otto founded basilicas and monasteries commemorating St
Adalbert both in Aachen and in Rome.21 Although Adémar’s story
mixes apocryphal invention and several misconceptions, it reveals
the basic logic of pious gift-giving that saturated the political culture
of the West. Bolesław I seems to have mastered these practices to
the degree that made him recognizable as a worthy member in this
exchange system even in the eyes of a distant chronicler.
Another celebrated example concerns the Gallus Anonymous’s early
twelfth-century Gesta principum Polonorum, whose author referred to an
unspecified Liber de passione martyris through which Emperor Otto III
learned about the cruel death of St Adalbert.22 Although nothing is
20
Knut Görich, ‘Otto III. öffnet das Karlsgrab in Aachen. Überlegungen zu
Heiligenverehrung, Heiligsprechung und Traditionsbildung‘, in Gerd Althoff and
Ernst Schubert (eds.), Herrschaftsrepräsentation im ottonischen Sachsen (Sigmaringen,
1998), 381–430; Levi Roach, ‘Emperor Otto III and the End of Time’, Transactions
of the Royal Historical Society, 23 (2013), 75–102, here 92–3.
21
Ademar de Chabannes, Chronique, Jules Chavanon (ed.) (Paris, 1897), iii,
31, 153–4: “Solium ejus [Charlemagne’s] imperator Oto direxit regi Botisclavo
pro reliquiis sancti Adalberii martiriis. Rex autem Botisclavus, accepto dono,
misit imperatori brachium de corpore, ejusdem sancti, et imperator gaudens illud
excepit, et in honore sancti Adalberii martiris basilicam Aquisgrani construxit …”;
Jacek Banaszkiewicz, ‘Otto III jedzie do Gniezna. O sprawie ceremonialnej wizyty
cesarza w kraju i stolicy Polan’, in Wojciech Dzieduszycki and Maciej Przybył (eds),
“Trakt cesarski”. Iława – Gniezno – Magdeburg (Poznań, 2002), 277–315, here: 295–7;
Roman Michałowski, The Gniezno Summit: The Religious Premises of the Founding of the
Archbishopric of Gniezno (Leiden, 2016), 139–42.
22
Marian Plezia, ‘Najstarszy zabytek historiografii polskiej: zaginiony żywot
św. Wojciecha’, Przegląd Historyczny, xliii (1952), 563–70; Przemysław Wiszewski,
222
Wojtek Jezierski
known about the content of this non-extant – and quite likely nonexistent – book, in the chronicle it is presented as setting in motion
a whole chain of events known as the Gniezno summit in 1000, when
the German emperor ceremonially visited Gniezno.23 As a way to
confirm their alliance, Otto III gave Bolesław I the Brave not only his
diadem but also one of the nails from Christ’s cross, as well as a copy
of the lance of St Maurice. “In return Bolesław gave to him an arm of
St Adalbert”, which the emperor soon repurposed as a founding relic
for the basilica he erected on the Isola Tiberina in Rome commemorating the saint (similarly to Adémar’s version).24 Again, regardless
of the exact details of this story, based on the fact that it was part of
Bolesław III the Wrymouth’s (1107–38) historiographical propaganda,
and the political implications of the gifts involved in this exchange,
it is clear that the Piast rulers quickly learned to imitate the political
commodification of relics practiced among the European elites.25
Domus Bolezlai. W poszukwianiu tradycji dynastycznej Piastów (do około 1138 roku)
(Wrocław, 2008), 608–15.
23
More recently on this meeting: Michałowski, The Gniezno Summit; see also
Johannes Fried, Otto III. und Boleslaw Chrobry: das Widmungsbild des Aachener Evangeliars,
der “Akt von Gnesen” und das frühe polnische und ungarische Königtum (Stuttgart, 2001);
Althoff, Otto III, 90–103.
24
Gallus Anonymous, Gesta principum Polonorum/The Deeds of the Princes of the
Poles, (eds., tr., & ann.) Paul W. Knoll and Frank Schaer (Budapest, 2003), 1, 6,
36–7: ‘pro quibus illi Bolezlauus sancti Adalberti brachium redonavit’.; Aleksander
Gieysztor, ‘Rzymska studzienka ze św. Wojciechem z roku około 1000’, in Gerard
Labuda (ed.), Święty Wojciech w polskiej tradycji historiograficznej (Warszawa, 1997),
337–49; Michałowski, The Gniezno Summit, 142–3.
25
Elżbieta Dąbrowska, ‘Pierwotne miejsce pochowania’, 252–6; Julia H.M. Smith,
‘Rulers and Relics. Treasure on Earth, Treasure in Heaven’, in Alexandra Walsham (ed.),
Relics and Remains, Past and Present Supplement, 5 (2010), 73–96; Andrzej Pleszczyński,
‘Poland as an Ally of the Holy Ottonian Empire’, in Przemysław Urbańczyk (ed.),
Europe around the year 1000 (Warszawa, 2001), 409–25; Przemysław Wiszewski, Domus
Bolezlai. Values and social identity in dynastic traditions of medieval Poland (c. 966–1138),
trans. Paul Barford (Leiden, 2010), 401–19. For more on gift-giving as means of
politics, see: Roman Michałowski, ‘Przyjaźń i dar w społeczeństwie karolińskim
w świetle translacji relikwii, part 1: Studium źródłoznawcze’, Studia Źródłoznawcze,
xxviii (1983), 1–39; Roman Michałowski, ‘Przyjaźń i dar w społeczeństwie karolińskim
w świetle translacji relikwii’, Part 2: ‘Analiza i interpretacja’, Studia Źródłoznawcze,
xxix (1985), 9–96; Gadi Algazi, Valentin Groebner, and Bernhard Jussen (eds.),
Negotiating the gift: pre-modern figurations of exchange (Göttingen, 2003); Arnoud-Jan A.
Bijsterveld, Do ut des: gift giving, memoria, and conflict management in the Medieval Low
Countries (Hilversum, 2007), 17–50.
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
223
The imagery of St Adalbert was extensively used for domestic propaganda too; for instance, through coinage. The first example consists
of the silver so-called ‘protective bracteates’ of Prince Boleslaw III
the Wrymouth, probably from ca 1135–8. The type 2 of these coins
features a scene of princely humility, that is, reverse sovereignty
and submission to the saint. Namely, it depicts the kneeling prince and
standing St Adalbert holding the pastoral in his left hand with his
right hand, or perhaps just two benedictory fingers, raised horizontally
over the prince’s head in what has been interpreted as a gesture of
(taming and dominating) protection. On the more rare type 1 of these
bracteates, St Adalbert is pictured en face, standing alone.26 He can
be identified by his pontifical clothes and by the pastoral held in his
right hand, which diagonally dissects his figure – an image strongly
reminiscent of St Adalbert’s depiction on the baptismal font from
the Isola Tiberina from around 1000, but also very typical for the
iconography of early medieval bishops.27
The second example consists of the silver dinars from Gniezno,
coined by Bolesław III around 1118. These feature a portrait of the
prince side by side with St Adalbert and the legend ADALBIBVS
(Adalbertus) on the reverse. In addition, one should also mention
the silver dinars coined by the Duke of Mazovia and High Duke of
Poland, Bolesław IV the Curly (1146–73), the son and later successor
of Bolesław III. One of several types of these coins features the duke
himself, sitting with a sword resting on his knees, framed by the legend
with his own name: BOLE[Z]LAVS. The reverse features the head of
It has been suggested, however, that the coin might not be of princely, but
of episcopal origin, i.e. of Gniezno origin: Marcin R. Pauk, ‘Quicquid pertinebat
ad imperium: Kościół w Polsce a Rzesza do połowy XII wieku’, in Józef Dobosz,
Marta Matla, and Jerzy Strzelczyk (eds.), Chrzest Mieszka I i chrystianizacja państwa
Piastów (Poznań, 2017), 249–80.
27
For the reproduction, see Wojciech Danielski, Kult św. Wojciecha za ziemiach
polskich (Lublin, 1997), 371; Edwin Rosenkranz, ‘O gnieźnieńskich brakteatach ze
św. Wojciechem z czasów Bolesława Krzywoustego’, Pomerania Antiqua, 6 (1975),
585–96; Andrzej Schmid, ‘Duży brakteat ze św. Wojciechem monetą arcybiskupstwa
gnieźnieńskiego’, Gniezno. Studia i materiały historyczne, 4 (1995), 179–88; Stanisław
Suchodolski, ‘Monety Świętego Wojciecha’, in Cezary Buśko (ed.), Civitas & villa.
Miasto i wieś w średniowiecznej Europie Środkowej (Wrocław and Praha, 2002), 447–452;
Aleksander Gieysztor, ‘Rzymska studzienka ze św. Wojciechem z roku około 1000’,
in Gerard Labuda (ed.), Święty Wojciech w polskiej tradycji historiograficznej (Warszawa,
1997), 337–49.
26
224
Wojtek Jezierski
St Adalbert, unmistakably identified as S ADALBERTV[S], encapsulated in what seems to be a reliquary. It would not be off the mark
to suggest that the use of the motif of the saint’s head on the coin
might have been inspired by the recent miraculous recovery of this
relic in Gniezno in 1127. Above all, in this latter case, the ruler and
his saint represented the two sides of the same coin, both literally
and metaphorically.
The early twelfth century marked the apex of the ideological symbiosis between the Piasts and St Adalbert, and their appropriation and
commodification of him as a means of political legitimacy. The saint
was considered the guard not only of the ruling dynasty, but of what
Thietmar dubbed, the domus Bolezlai, that is, the Polish polity and
its future fate.28 This expression, used about Boleslaw I, might have
been an exaggeration by the early eleventh-century standards, but it
fit exceptionally well to Boleslaw III Wrymouth’s rule, especially given
the miraculous, protective apparition of St Adalbert noted by Gallus
Anonymous.29 In other words, St Adalbert was the closest the Piasts
ever got to having a dynastical saint without actually going as far as
to consecrate a member of their dynasty.30 The Gniezno bishops’ role
in all this seemed somewhat overshadowed, however.
V
THE FINGER THAT WASN’T THERE:
NEW MIRACLES AND RELICS
With this background in mind, it is time to turn the Gniezno’s individual mythopoetic efforts related to their saint. As already mentioned,
the Tempore illo brings little new information about his martyrdom: the
cutting off of his head and putting it on top of a debranched tree largely
28
Thietmar von Merseburg, Chronicon, Holzmann (ed.), VI, 95, 389; Wiszewski,
Domus Bolezlai, trans. Barford, 44–50; Marcin R. Pauk, ‘Eine Dynastie oder mehrere?
Herrschaft und ihre Legitimation in der politischen Kultur Polens (12.–13. Jahrhundert)’, in Grischa Vercamer and Ewa Wółkiewicz (eds.), Legitimation von
Fürstendynastien in Polen und dem Reich: Identitätsbildung im Spiegel schriftlicher Quellen
(12.–15. Jahrhundert) (Wiesbaden, 2016), 29–54, here 36–38.
29
Gallus Anonymous, Gesta principum Polonorum, Knoll and Schaer (eds.), 2, 6,
130–1.
30
Pac, ‘Problem świętości władców’, passim; Pauk, ‘Eine Dynastie oder
mehrere?’, 39.
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
225
follows the accounts by Canaparius and Bruno. It is the posthumous
miracles that offer novel elements, such as the stopover of the body
of the saint, after Bolesław I purchased it from the pagan Prussians,
in the monastery of the Canon Regulars in Trzemeszno, where some
miraculous healings ensued.31 This is a clear example how a twelfthcentury monastic foundation created by Bolesław III, which was closely
connected to the Gniezno Archbishopric, was retrofitted into the
local reality of the late tenth century in order to boost its prestige
and ancient lineage. In this sense, Trzemeszno entered the realm of
sacred history and the landscape of St Adalbert, always already associated with him.32 However, another entirely novel and more puzzling
addition – and an outright invention – is the miracle regarding the
collecting of the dismembered body of the saint proceeding with its
transfer to Greater Poland. Particularly, the role played by his finger.
As the Tempore illo reports it, after his decapitation the Prussians
chopped St Adalbert’s body into pieces and angrily scattered them
around – behaviour previously unreported by any other text related to
the saint. The following night an anonymous Prussian neophyte, who
hosted St Adalbert during the days immediately preceding his death,
was admonished through an angelic vision to carefully collect all the
members of the body and with due reverence guard these holy relics
(sacerrimas reliquias). Having gathered everything he could find, the
Prussian saw that one finger was missing. He looked for the finger for
many days; long enough to awake the suspicion of his pagan wife and,
eventually, of the villagers. Forced to reveal the whereabouts of the
body, the neophyte was punished both physically (by his neighbors)
and spiritually (by God) and the holy corpse fell into the hands of
the infidels, who decided to trade it with King Bolesław I.33 However,
when the still incomplete body was in the custody of the heathens:
‘De sancto Adalberto episcopo’, Perlbach (ed.), 18–19, 1183–4.
Józef Dobosz, Monarchia i możni wobec kościoła w Polsce do początku XIII wieku
(Poznań, 2002), 147–8, 194–5; Elżbieta Dąbrowska, ‘Pierwotne miejsce pochowania’,
259–62; Mortensen, ‘Sanctified beginnings’, passim; To put it in terms of evolutionary
biology, in the case of Trzemeszno stopover St Adalbert seems to have been used
for the construction of Gniezno’s cultural niche and retroactively incorporated into
it as its defining element: Zeder, ‘Core questions’, 3192, 3195–6; Greger Larson
and Dorina Q. Fuller, ‘The Evolution of Animal Domestication’, Annual Review of
Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 45 (2014), 115–36, here 117–20.
33
‘De sancto Adalberto episcopo’, Perlbach (ed.), 16–17, 1183.
31
32
226
Wojtek Jezierski
[s]oon some fishermen who were fishing near the shores of the sea – which
was the refuge of the saint [near to] where he suffered his martyrdom – saw
a small fish swimming among the sea waves. In her belly they noticed
something glowing like a candle. Amazed, they let go [of other fish] and
together hastened to catch that one; they caught it quickly and by opening
its viscera extracted the finger of the holy bishop which glowed like candle,
which made them ask each other what it was. As they studied it more
closely, thanks to God’s will they soon recognized the shape of the finger
which elapsed from the holy body. They thus hurried to the people, who
they knew kept the venerable members and there they saw that also these
[members] radiated with the same glow like the finger. The entire village
gathered to this spectacle, in order to guard the celestial body all the
more carefully.34
Although the story about the finger found in the belly of a fish
is certainly apocryphal, echoing similar motifs popular in miracle
stories,35 it is not without consequence for the questions of domestication of saints nor for the problem of the originality and/or imitative
character of the Polish medieval culture. It is also particularly helpful
for reconstructing the ideas attached to St Adalbert’s person, how
Gniezno’s episcopal community perceived itself, and the role of its
patron saint in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. To address these
problems, a simple yet pressing question needs to be answered first:
which finger exactly was swallowed by the little fish (pisciculum)?
The text of the legend, unfortunately, does not specify which digit it
was. An informed guess can be made, however. The source designates
it as the finger of the holy bishop (digitum sancti pontificis). If a medieval
bishop needed any fingers, he surely needed at least three, all belonging
34
‘De sancto Adalberto episcopo’, ibid., 17, 1183: “Post aliquantulum vero
temporis, dum quidam naute piscarentur in ripa maris, que hospicio sancti, ubi
martirizatus est, erat contigua, repente vident inter fluctus quendam natantem
pisciculum, cuius in visceribus miri fulgoris candela videbatur ardere. Quo attoniti
miraculo, ceteris omissis, hunc omnes capere festinant, quem cito captum mox
eviscerant atque de illius ventriculo digitum sancti pontificis in modum rutilantis
candele flammigerantem extrahunt, idque admirari non sufficientes, quid sit, inter se
requirunt. Interea volente Deo curiosius intuentes formam digiti agnoscunt eumque
de sancto corpore elapsum fuisse perpendunt. Tunc illos properanter adeunt, apud
quos veneranda membra noverant esse recondita, ubi et ceteros eius artus ceu
digitum, quem detulerant, itidem radiare conspiciunt. Ad quod spectaculum tota
villa confluens, celeste corpus deinceps sedulo custodiunt”.
35
Frederic C. Turbach, Index exemplorum: A Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales
(Helsinki, 1981), no. 3350, 260, no. 3835, 296, no. 4102, 315.
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
227
to his right palm. The first two were the index finger and the middle
finger. These two digits were crucial for performing the gestures of
benediction and consecration, which were a widespread and consistent
motif in the iconography of bishops throughout the Middle Ages.36 The
third, and just as important, was the ring finger on which ever since
the early Middle Ages a bishop wore the visual sign of his episcopal
dignity and marriage with his church: the ring.37
That these three episcopal fingers were of greater value than others
can be inferred, for instance, from the story of the so-called “cadaver
synod” that took place in Rome in January of 897. Pope Stephen VI
(896–7), seeking to nullify the decisions and episcopal appointments
of Pope Formosus (891–6) opted for the drastic move of putting his
predecessor’s body on trial. Without going into the complex political
reasons behind this synod, the ritual aspects of this spectacle are
quite telling. The body of the pope was exhumed, dressed in full
papal vestments, and put on the pontifical seat with a deacon at its
side to answer for the deceased. According to Liutprand of Cremona,
who recounted the details of this scene half a century later, the main
charge against Pope Formosus was the usurpation of the episcopal
dignity in Rome while he was still bishop of Porto. Accordingly, the
annulment of the pope’s decisions demanded stripping his body of
the vestments and chopping off the three crucial fingers of the right
palm, after which the body was tossed into Tiber.38 Like in a mirror
darkly, this story shows which of bishop’s fingers counted the most,
both in life and after death.
Still, one of three potential fingers was too vague an answer for
the Gniezno authors. Determining which finger glowed so brightly
in the fish’s viscera must have seemed particularly pressing for the
See reproductions of manuscripts in Eric Palazzo, L’évêque et son image:
l’illustration du pontifical au Moyen Âge (Turnhout, 1999), 87, 131, 150, 157, 207,
216, 221, 226, 229, 240, 248, 296, 325, 327, 332.
37
Katarzyna Bogacka, Insygnia biskupie w Polsce. Pierścień, pektorał, infuła XI–XVIII w.
(Warszawa, 2008), 19–31, 219–30; Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies:
a Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, 1997), 212, fn. 54, 216–17; Visa
Immonen and Jussi-Pekka Taavitsainen, ‘Finger of a saint, thumb of a priest. Medieval
relics in the Diocese of Turku, and the archaeology of lived bodies’, Scripta Instituti
Donneriani Aboensis, 23 (2011), 141–173.
38
Liudprand of Cremona, ‘Antapodosis’, in Paolo Chiesa (ed.), Liudprandi
Cremonensis Opera omnia, i (Turnhout, 1998), 30, 23: “His expletis, sacratis mox
exutum vestimentis digitisque tribus abcisis, in Tiberim iactare praecepit, …”.
36
228
Wojtek Jezierski
anonymous author of the Miracula, who used the finger and the fish
story in the opening paragraph.39 It was apparently so pressing that
later in the text the author openly addressed this issue: the anonymous
Prussian collecting the members of the body could not find the finger,
for “it was cut off by one of the perfidious [pagans] because of the
ring [anulum] and [then] tossed into the river”.40
Moreover, this finger not only a glowed like a candle, but was once it
returned to the body, it ignited the whole corpse so that it radiated with
the same glorious light. The motif and conviction that parts and entire
bodies of martyrs and saints were luminous have long been one of the
crucial and most widespread elements of the cult of saints in medieval
Christendom, and a visible proof of their sanctity.41 This is thus the right
occasion to return to the texts constructing the cult of St Adalbert as
well as to the more immediate geographical and textual context in which
it was emerging, that is, the hagiography composed on the Baltic Rim.
In case of these secondary hagiographies of St Adalbert, the likely
inspiration for their authors was the redaction C of the Vita prior by
Canaparius, together with its offshoots. Towards the very end of the
text its author added a wholly new sentence to the Roman text, stating
that after decapitation the body of St Adalbert was thrown into the
sea, which hid it from view. As a response, a column of burning light
rose to the heavens which led the followers of the missionary back
to the body. Having recuperated the head and transported the corpse
elsewhere, they were joined by many other Christians and constructed
a suitable church praising St Adalbert’s name and virtue.42 Also, the
Kętrzyński (ed.), ‘Miracula Sancti Adalberti’, 1, 26.
‘Miracula Sancti Adalberti’, ibid., 8, 33: “Verumtamen cum singula frusta
sollerter coherentibus artubus adaptaret, unius manus deesse sibi digitum deprehendit, quem quidam ex perfidis abscisum propter anulum, abstracto eo, in
flumen proiecerat”.
41
Arnold Angenendt, Heilige und Reliquien: die Geschichte ihres Kultes vom frühen
Christentum bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1997), 115–19; Arnold Angenendt, ‘Holy
Corpses and the Cult of Relics’, in Marika Räsänen, Gritje Hartmann, and Earl
Jeffrey Richards (eds.), Relics, Identity and Memory in Medieval Europe (Turnhout,
2016), 13–28, here 17–18; Cynthia Hahn, ‘Seeing and Believing: The Construction
of Sanctity in Early-Medieval Saints’ Shrines’, Speculum, 72 (1997), 1079–106; Maria
Starnawska, Świętych życie po życiu. Relikwie w kulturze religijnej na ziemiach polskich
w średniowieczu (Warszawa, 2008), 443–52.
42
‘Sancti Adalberti episcopi Pragensis et martyris: Vita prior: Redactio Cassinensis’, Karwasińska (ed.), 30, 84: “Inde uero indicio fulgide columne super corpus
39
40
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
229
Passio from Tegernsee ruminated on the question of the light emanating
from the martyr’s body. It did this fleetingly however, and solely in
negative terms. It says only that after the decapitation the murderers
impaled the martyr’s head and put his body into the nearby river “so
that it would not be a burning and shining light for the people”.43 In
addition, the figure of the fish entered this tradition for the first time,
if only in form of a comparison. The text of the Passio states that seven
days after the martyrdom – in between which St Adalbert’s head had
reached Bolesław I in Gniezno and worked its first miracle (a captive’s
chains fell off), which prompted the king to offer ransom for the
corpse – the ruler’s messengers together with the saint’s companions
reached the place of the killing. Upon their arrival they not only saw
that “an eagle guarded the impaled head so that no other bird dared
to touch it”, but also found the corpse itself which “flowed up to the
shore like a fish [piscino more defluit adripam]”.44
With all those elements in place, we can now ‘reverse engineer’ the
likely path of textual evolution which led to developing the fragment
about the finger episode in the Tempore illo and the Miracula.45 It
seems that their authors took the scanty information and literary
devices found in the previous texts and, by gluing them together with
a great deal of imagination, perhaps even including oral traditions
circulating in the Gniezno milieu, blew these up into an entirely new,
mythologizing episode.46 In this process of miraculous snowballing,
a body that did not emanate any light later glowed; the fact that it
floated like a fish soon turned it into an actual fish. Similarly, the sea
changed into a river and changed back into a sea again; a previously
eius in celum usque porrecte manifestatum est corpus eius discipulis, et uenientes
cum multis christianis abstulerunt corpus eius, et coniungentes caput corpori
honorifice sepelierullt, et dignam ecclesiam nomine eius construxerunt, ubi merita
et uirtutes eius exhuberant usque in hodiernum diem”.
43
‘Passio s. Adalperti martiris (BHL 40)’, Sosnowski (ed.), 66: “coruscantem
populo lucere luceram”, with a quote from John 5.35.
44
‘Passio s. Adalperti martiris (BHL 40)’, ibid., 68–70: “Mira res et inaudibilis!
Sex dies corpus almum in flumine cui inmerserant requieuit, septimo autem die
piscino more defluit adripam, vbi inueniebatur, tribus uidelicet diebus caput in
sude fixum ab aquila ne ab ullo uolucrum tangeretur, custoditvm”.
45
Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (London, 2013),
14, 80.
46
For a discussion on the oral traditions and polemics of different milieus
regarding the person and activity of St Adalbert, see Sosnowski, Studia nad wczesnymi.
230
Wojtek Jezierski
only decapitated corpse was now being chopped into pieces that had
to be collected; so that in the next step a finger could escape it, start
to glow, and then start wearing an episcopal ring at the next turn of
this textual evolution.
Moreover, with the addition of each new fantastic layer their authors
inserted more and more witnesses to both the miracles and relics into
their accounts. This started already in the Monte Cassino redaction
of Vita prior, where the previously unheard of group of Christians
returned with St Adalbert’s disciples to recover his body and then
started building the first church to propagate his cult. In the Tempore
illo, it is the fishermen that fulfil a somewhat ambiguous function in
the story. Although certainly pagan, in the logic of the narrative they
were performing the inventio of a relic and, as God’s tools (volente Deo),
served as first witnesses recognizing (intuentes … agnoscunt) the finger
as a part of the sacred corpse. Even the murderous Prussian villagers
to whom the fishermen returned the finger seemed to act as unwitting
witnesses of a heavenly spectacle, which can be interpreted to mean
that the Tempore illo was already a part of the new culture of visibility
of relics coming from the West.47 As we shall see below, colonizing
these accounts with laypeople was not only a sign of Gniezno’s way
to popularize the cult of its patron during the high Middle Ages, but
also a mutualist stage in the domestication process.
VI
SCANDINAVIAN PARALLELS: ST SIGFRID & ST HENRY
This is a good moment to zoom out of the Polish case and take
a closer look at similar patterns of episcopal power and institutional self-legitimation through domesticated saints occurring on
the north-eastern peripheries of Europe during the same period,
whose correspondences go deeper than the ostensible resemblance
of their use of glowing relics. For instance, in the Swedish Legenda
Sancti Sigfridi, composed around 1200 in two different redactions,
St Sigfrid is said to have been an English missionary and bishop (supposedly a former archbishop of York) who reached Sweden around the
47
Angenendt, Heilige und Reliquien, 158–61; Hahn, ‘Seeing and believing’, passim;
Starnawska, Świętych życie po życiu, 586–9; Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great
Things?, 239–50.
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
231
year 1000.48 According to the sources produced by the episcopal milieu
at Växjö, Sigfrid was a very ambitious missionary, whose activity was
concentrated in the region of Värend (Latin: Warendia, historical part
of today’s Småland), where he destroyed many heathen temples and
raised just as many churches.
The centre of St Sigfrid’s activity was Växjö, where he installed his
nephews – Unaman, Sunaman, and Vinaman – as priests. One day,
while he was away from Värend attending the royal court, the three
nephews were decapitated by the local apostates, who swiftly disposed
of the martyrs’ heads by sinking them into the waters of the nearby
lake in a chest. The murder came as a shock to both the missionary
and the newly converted king, and St Sigfrid had to hasten home. One
night, as he wandered sorrowful along the shores of the Lake of Växjö
(Swedish: Växjösjön), the bishop noticed three candles floating over the
waves on the far eastern shore. Reaching the spot, he retrieved
the three glowing heads from the bottom of the lake.49 Uncorrupted
48
Sara E. Ellis Nilsson, Creating Holy People and Places on the Periphery: A Study of
the Emergence of Cults of Native Saints in the Ecclesiastical Provinces of Lund and Uppsala
from the Eleventh to the Thirteenth Centuries (Gothenburg: Dissertation from the
Department of Historical Studies, Gothenburg University, 2015), 86–7.
49
‘Historia Sancti Sigfridi’, in Ericus G. Geijer and Johannes H. Schröder (eds.),
Scriptores Rerum Svecicarum Medii aevi, ii (Uppsala, 1828) 344–64, here 360, 362:
“Eodem namque tempore, cum vir sanctus, pro nepotum suorum ostensione Dei
jugiter clementiam exoraret, nocte quadam ex suo domicilio exiens, cum secus
stagnum quod coemiterio ejusdem ecclesiae adjacet, deambularet vidit in stagno
tria luminaria in modum stellarum clare lucentia, et ad littora orientalis ripae
tendentia. … Cum autem eadem luminaria littori approprinquarent, ejectis vir domini
cothurnis, quos in pedibus habebat, seque in aquam mittens, obviam prosiluit.
Vir itaque domini propius accedens, ut desiderium cordis sui acquireret celerius,
lumen quod oculis ejus prius apparebat, ablatum est. Illo vero perseverante ut
quaereret, diligentiusque persctrutante, invenit tandem situlam ligneam cum tribus
capitibus, … . Apparebant namque capita eorum adeo recentia et incorrupta, ac si
eadem hora a corporibus fuissent abscisa.”; In the later, shorter redaction of the
Legend this scene is framed the following way: ‘Legenda Sancti Sigfridi [according
to Cod. Ups. C 292]’, in Alf Önnerfors, Die Hauptaffsungen des Sigrfridsoffizium.
Mit kritischen Editionen (Lund, 1968), 117–25, here 124: “Sanctus itaque sigfridus
pro suis nepotibus gracias agens deo, qui eos tam preciosa morte per sanguinis
effusionem ad se venire disposuit, semper intimo cordis affect petuit a domino,
vt de corporum eorum inuencione consolari mereretur. Quadam igitur uice cum
ambularet cum suis tempore serotino iuxta stagnum, in quo capita eorum dimersa
intellexerat, uidit in medio stagni tria luminaria in modum stellarum lucencia et ad
oram orientalis ripe tendencia, et letu deum benedicens ad locum illum cum suis
232
Wojtek Jezierski
by the water, the heads spoke to St Sigfrid, explicitly asking God to
take vengeance on the murderers and their offspring.50 This prompted
the saint to raise a church on the spot, which came to be the Växjö
cathedral, to where the heads of the martyrs were transferred.51 As
a further reminder of his activity, a stone edifice in the honour of the
saint and John the Baptist was raised nearby. By means of contiguity,
this second structure conveniently associated the beheading of the
three nephews with the prophet, making the three martyred priests,
as well as St Sigfrid, protagonists in a quasi-biblical story.52 Needless
to say, it was there that the episcopal seat presided when the Legenda
Sancti Sigfridi was written.53
In many respects, St Sigfrid is a particularly fortunate parallel for
St Adalbert. The legend insists on his close association with Olof
Skötkonung (995–1022), the first Christian ruler of Sweden, whom
Sigfrid supposedly baptized in Husaby in Västergötland. However,
this claim goes against the information about Sigfrid provided by the
chronologically much closer and more reliable evidence of Adam of
Bremen’s Gesta, which makes the meeting between the two men very
unlikely.54 Like St Adalbert, St Sigfrid too was considered to be the
celeriter properauit. … Que capita in ecclesia vexionensi honorifice sunt recondita,
sed corpora eorundem martirum Christi exigentibus peccatis hominum usque in
diem hodiernum non sunt inuenta”.
50
‘Legenda Sancti Sigfridi [C 292]’, Önnerfors (ed.), 124: “Intellexit enim uir
sanctus se a domino exauditum <et> pro suorum reuelacione nepotum exultauit
in domino. Et aquam aliquantulum ingressus inuenit vrnam cum tribus capitibus
lapide magno alligatam, quam assumens in terram detulit, et capita in sinum suum
lacrimando colligens et eis pie paternitatis affectu condolens dixit: ‘Vindicet Deus’.
Statim unius capitis uox emissa respondit: ‘Vindicabitur’. Aliud inquid: ‘Quando?’
Tertium subjunxit: ‘In filios filiorum’”.
51
‘Historia Sancti Sigfridi’, Geijer and Schröder (eds.), 356: “Cum beatus pontifex
apud Regem moraretur, tres nepotes sui, ut dictum est, Unamannus, Sunamannus,
et Vinamannus, in eodem loco, quem vir sanctus ædificaverat et ecclesiam de lignis
construxerat, qui nunc dicitur Wexiö”.
52
René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Batlimore, 1989), 125–48.
53
‘Historia Sancti Sigfridi’, 350: ‘In quo loco [Östrabo] ædificium constructum
est lapideum in honorem ejusdem Sancti et memoriam Johannis Baptistæ quæ
videlicet ecclesia sede episcopal decorata est usque in hunc diem”.
54
‘Historia Sancti Sigfridi’, 356: “Lætificatus autem Rex in occursum ejus ivit, et
suscepit eum cum magno honore. Post non multos dies, prædicante viro Dei verbum
salutis populo, credidit Rex et baptizatus est, omnesque familiares et domestici
ejus, universusque exercitus cum tota ejus familia”; The chronology of St Sigfrid’s
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
233
patron saint of his country, the first traces of his special protection
stemming from the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.55
Finally, just like St Adalbert – who in the twelfth century began to
be falsely considered the original archbishop of Gniezno56 – so too
St Sigfrid was misleadingly presented as the first bishop of Växjö.
Such fierce promotion of St Sigfrid coincides with an interesting moment in the history of the episcopal claims of Växjö in the
second half of the twelfth century and its association with his cult.
According to the Legenda, Sigfrid was singlehandedly responsible for
instituting the original division of dioceses between Västergötland
and Östergötland and for ordaining the first bishops of Uppsala and
Strängnäs – neither of which actually occurred before the twelfth
century. Such an exorbitant claim did not just ignore the historical
life suggests he visited Sweden too late, in the 1020s at the earliest, in order to be
able to procure King Olof Skötkonung’s baptism. It has been suggested that Olof ’s
baptism might have been the effect of Bruno of Querfurt’s missionary activity in
the Baltic region and the priests he dispatched to Scandinavia. The presumable
connection between Bruno and Olof and his assistance in the king’s baptism was
Priest Turgot from Bremen, later bishop of Västergötland whom Bruno send to
Sweden – Henrik Janson, ‘Konfliktlinjer i tidig nordeuropeisk kyrkoorganisation’, in
Niels Lund (ed.), Kristendommen i Danmark før 1050 (Roskilde, 2004), 215–34, here
215–17. The second possible link was Mieszko I’s daughter and Boleslaw I Brave’s
half-sister, Świętosława/Gunhild, married to Erik Segersäll, Olof Skötkonung’s
mother – Tryggve Lundén, Sveriges missionärer, helgon och kyrkogrundare. En bok om
Sveriges kristnande (Helsingborg, 1983), 52–4. For the recapitulation of the complicated
relationships and problems with identification of Świętosława/Gunhild/Sigrid
Storråda and the role she/they played in connecting the Piasts with the Scandinavian
ruling families, see Rafał T. Prinke, ‘Świętosława, Sygryda, Gunhilda. Tożsamość
córki Mieszka I i jej skandynawskie związki’, Roczniki historyczne, lxx (2004), 81–110.
55
However, this conviction did not become widespread before the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. In the early fifteenth-century St Sigfrid’s officium, contained
in the Breviarium Scarense, the saint is called ‘pater Suecie’. Also two diplomas
(Svenskt Diplomatariums huvudkartotek över medeltidsbreven, hereinafter: SDHK
nno. 5512: https://sok.riksarkivet.se/dokument/sdhk/5512.pdf, and 5782: https://
sok.riksarkivet.se/dokument/sdhk/5782.pdf) of King Magnus Eriksson (1319–64)
given to the cathedral of Växjö in 1347 and 1349 contain invocations of St Sigrfid
as patron of Sweden: “Beatissimi sigfridi regni nostri suecie patroni” and, “necnon
beatissimi Sigfridi, regni nostri Suecie patroni”, respectively; Lundén, Sveriges missionärer, 48–50; Charlotte Vainio, ‘Patroni regni och folket. En studie i helgonkultens
folkliga förankring’, Historisk tidskrift för Finland, 94 (2009), 277–93.
56
Ginter, ‘Wątki hagiograficzne’, 33–4; Wiszewski, Domus Bolezlai, 188–9; Pauk,
‘Quicquid pertinebat’, 270–2.
234
Wojtek Jezierski
Fig. 1. A quite literal late-medieval interpretation of the miraculous recovery
of the heads glowing like candles can
be seen in the frescoes by Johannes
Ivan, dated to ca 1451–2 in the earlyfourteenth century Vendels church
(Vendels kyrka) in Uppland, ca 40 km
north of Uppsala (Source: Riksantikvarieämbetet, Stockholm, sign. K 1 C:
782 Vendel Gr 3-12; Wikimedia Commons, Creative commons license57)
Fig. 2. The seal of the episcopal chapter of Växjö attached a diploma issued
in July of 1292 representing the three
heads of the martyr brothers with lights
over their heads (Source: Riksarkivet,
Stockholm; photo: Emre Olgun58)
57
The image can be consulted online at the Arkivalisk-Topografiska
Arkivet in Riksarkivarieämbetet: http://kmb.raa.se/cocoon/bild/show-image.
html?id=16000200139790 (Accessed: 5 Dec. 2017). For more on the dating and
the author of these frescoes, see Henrik Alm, ‘Vendels kyrkmålningar av Johannes
Ivan 1451–1452’, Fornvännen: Journal of Swedish Antiquarian Research (1930), 376–80.
58
The 1292 diploma issued by the Växjö cathedral chapter for Uppsala can
be consulted in its entirety (including the seal) here: https://sok.riksarkivet.se/
sdhk?SDHK=1568&postid=sdhk_1568 (Accessed: 7 Dec. 2017).
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
235
and institutional episcopal precedence of Skara, which dated back to the
early eleventh century, but openly defied the episcopal supremacy of the
bishops of Linköping, in whose province Växjö was located. However,
even if the information about this is scanty, at some point between
1163 and 1170 Växjö’s cathedral chapter, led by a certain Baldwin
(Balduinus), its first historical bishop, seceded from the bishopric
of Linköping.59 It appears therefore that the creation of the legend
of St Sigfrid, its proliferation as an officium, and the doggedness to
antedate the saint’s association with the converter king – all of which
essentially suggested Växjö was the most ancient see in the country –
were used as leverage to elevate the new and feeble episcopal dignity
in the delicate period of transition to autonomy. In other words, the
invention of the miracle of the radiant heads of the three martyrs for
the creation of a completely new local mythopoesis and sacred geography linking the Växjö cathedral and the episcopal estate in Östrabo,
that is, the cultural niche of both St Sigfrid and his successors, was
instrumental for building the new identity.60
Moreover, creating such a strong mission- and martyr-oriented
identity, spiced with vengeful overtones targeting the paganism of
the local populations over generations (‘Vindicet Deus’ … ‘In filios
filiorum’), made a lot of sense in a region such as Värend considering that it saw some sort of crusading military intervention known
as the Kalmar naval levy (Swedish: Kalmare ledung) by the Norwegian King Sigurd the Crusader (Jorsalfarare) in 1123.61 This martyr
identity was so strong that by the end of the thirteenth century the
three radiant heads floating above the lake were featured on the
episcopal seal of Växjö bishops (the legend: [SIGILL]VM CAPITVLI
WEXIONESIS). It was an expression par excellence of the episcopal
Nilsson, Creating Holy People, 175–82.
‘Historia Sancti Sigfridi’, in Ericus G. Geijer and Johannes H. Schröder (eds.),
Scriptores Rerum Svecicarum Medii aevi, ii (Uppsala, 1828), 344–64, here 350: “[St Sifrid]
pervenit tandem in terram, quae Værendia dicitur, quæ prima est terrarium in
partibus Gothiæ ad meridiem … In hanc ergo, ut diximus, sanctus vir Sigrirdus
Eboracensis Archiepiscopus primum ingressum habuit, et in loco Östrabo, qui
nunc ab incolis dicitur Wexiö, domino ducente pervenit.”; Ellis Nilsson, Creating
Holy People, 212–14.
61
For a more extreme case of how the crusading context influenced the promotion of saints, see Carsten Selch Jensen, ‘History Made Sacred: Martyrdom and the
Making of a Sanctified Beginning in Early Thirteenth-Century Livonia’, in Saints
and Sainthood, 145–72.
59
60
236
Wojtek Jezierski
identity presented through the fundamental mythopoetic moment
of martyrdom (Fig. 2).62
The glowing heads and bodies of the martyrs aside, the example
from the Baltic region that comes perhaps closest to St Adalbert’s
finger-ring-fish episode is that of St Henry (d. 1156), the legendary
first bishop-martyr of Turku (Åbo) and missionary to Finland, then
a part of Sweden. According to the tradition, Henry was an English
cleric who accompanied the papal legate Nicholas Breakspear – later
pope as Hadrian IV (1154–9) – during the latter’s visit to Scandinavia
in the mid-1150s. After the departure of the papal legate, Henry stayed
behind and became responsible for the Swedish Christianization of
Finland Proper in the so-called First Finnish Crusade, which he allegedly organized together with the Swedish King Erik the Saint (Erik IX
Jedvardsson, 1155–60). Notwithstanding the fact that St Henry has
never been officially canonized, that the very historicity of the events
surrounding both his and Erik’s actions and their very figures have
been put into doubt, and that the initial Christianization of Finland
almost certainly predated his arrival, the contemporary hagiographic
material concerning him and the popularity of his cult are valuable
for the purposes of this study.63
The primary source for St Henry’s missionary life and death is the
brief Legenda Sancti Henrici, also known as De sancto Henrico. Written
most probably at some point between 1270 and 1290 in the milieu
of the Turku/Åbo Cathedral (in Finland Proper), which was almost
exclusively populated by Swedish clerics at the time, it consists
Toni Schmid, Den helige Sigfrid (Lund, 1931), 85–6; Brigitte M. Bedos-Rezak,
When Ego Was Imago: Signs of Identity in the Middle Ages (Leiden, 2011), 96–107, 243–7;
Cf. Lars Bisgaard, ‘Saints, Guilds, and Seals: From Exclusivity to Competition’, in
Saints and Sainthood, 201–28, here 206–8, 212–14, 217–21.
63
Tuomas Heikkilä, Sankt Henrikslegenden, trans. Rainer Knapas (Helsinki, 2009),
48–52, 140; Tuomas Heikkilä, ‘An Imaginary Saint for an Imagined Community:
St. Henry and the Creation of Christian Identity in Finland, Thirteenth–Fifteenth
Centuries’, in Wojtek Jezierski and Lars Hermanson (eds.), Imagined Communities on the Baltic Rim, from the Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries (Amsterdam, 2016),
223–52; Philip Line, ‘Sweden’s Conquest of Finland: A Clash of Cultures?’, in
Alan V. Murray (ed.), The North-Eastern Frontiers of Medieval Europe: The Expansion of
Latin Christendom in the Baltic lands (Farnham, 2014), 57–99; Jens E. Olesen, ‘The
Swedish Expeditions (‘Crusades’) Towards Finland Reconsidered’, in Kirsi Salonen
and Sari Katajala-Peltomaa (eds.), Church and belief in the Middle Ages: Popes, Saints,
and Crusaders (Amsterdam, 2016),. 251–67, here 255–9.
62
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
237
of two parts: the vita proper (lectio I–IV) followed by the miracula
(lectio V–IX).64
To briefly present his fate emerging from the legend, Henry is said to
have come to Finland directly from Uppsala where he previously served
as bishop. Together with King Erik, “like two great lights” (“quasi
duobus magnis luminaribus”), they put great effort into converting –
somewhat forcibly – the local population and raising churches, partially
motivated by revenge for the ravaging of the Swedish coasts by the
Finnish pirates. Once peace was achieved, Erik returned to Sweden,
leaving Henry behind. Similarly to St Sigfrid, throughout the text of
the Legenda Henry’s bravery and the great risks he was taking are
repeatedly stressed as a way to foreshadow his martyrdom.65 As it
were, among the many sheep in his flock was one person (the name
Lali by which the man is known is a post-medieval invention) who
particularly hated the man of God. One day he simply killed Henry
(the use of an axe and the decapitation, which flourish in numerous
depictions of St Henry, were also added later), who thus immediately
entered the heavenly Jerusalem crowned with a palm of glory. The
ensuing eleven miracles fall into two categories: punitive and protective
(mainly concerning healing from various illnesses), strongly echoing
similar miracles from other parts of Europe.
As far as parallels between St Henry’s miracles and St Adalbert’s
miracles in the Tempore illo are concerned, the second miracle in particular stands out, as it combines the bishop’s finger wearing a ring
as well as an animal protecting it. After St Henry’s death – and after
his murderer was miraculously scalped by the birretum he stole from
the bishop – the following second miracle occurred:
The finger of the glorious martyr had been cut off in winter66 and long
afterwards, in spring, when the ice had melted and dissolved everywhere
64
The newest and the most comprehensive edition of the Legenda can be found in
Tuomas Heikkilä, Pyhän Henrikin legenda (Helsinki, 2005); here I am using the Swedish
translation of this book, which contains the Latin edition of the Legenda sancti Henrici:
Tuomas Heikkilä, Sankt Henrikslegenden, trans. Rainer Knapas (Helsinki, 2009), 254–75.
65
Wojtek Jezierski, ‘Risk Societies on the Frontier. Missionary Emotional Communities in Southern Baltic, 11th–13th c.’, in Wojtek Jezierski and Lars Hermanson
(eds.), Imagined Communities on the Baltic Rim, Eleventh–Fifteenth Centuries (Amsterdam,
2016), 155–90.
66
St Henry is said to have died on Jan. 20, so the miracle supposedly occurred
the following spring.
238
Wojtek Jezierski
else, a raven was found croaking over the finger with the ring on, lying on
a piece of ice.67
Contrary to Gniezno, where both the previous hagiographic tradition
and unbroken apostolic succession were already in place, the author(s)
of the legend of St Henry were in a much more difficult position. Everything had to be invented and constructed from scratch. Thus unlike
the initial ambiguity and the two-stage process of textual identification
of St Adalbert’s relic with the episcopal dignity of Gniezno, which
occurred between the Tempore illo and the Miracula, the anonymous
author(s) of the Legenda sancti Henrici made it clear from the start which
finger wearing what ring was essential to the story. After all, the textual
institution of this cult must have seemed to have arrive quite belatedly,
almost a century and a half after Henry’s supposed martyrdom. It was
thus all the more important to get everything right from the start.
As argued by Tuomas Heikkilä, the writing of the Legenda needs to be
considered in close relation to the construction of the Turku Cathedral
in the 1290s and the translation of the saint’s relics in the preceding
decades. The original site of burial of St Henry from the mid-twelfth
century – after his murder at Lake Köylio (Finnish: Köyliönjärvi) – was
the church in Nousiainen in south-western Finland (ca 20 km north of
Turku/Åbo). From there some part of the relics, it seems, was moved
to Korois in Räntämäki (a suburb of modern-day Turku/Åbo) by the
River Aura (Finnish: Aurajoki) in 1229, at the time the bishopric of
Turku was being established, while Nousiainen retained the reputation
as the burial place of the saint and destination of pilgrimages. Half
a century later, the vagrant relics were on the move again. A new
cathedral was being built in downtown Turku and its bishops were in
dire need to legitimize their authority by taming the wayward saint
and associating themselves with his image. How intimate was this
relationship between the domesticator (the Turku milieu) and the
domesticate (St Henry) in south-western Finland? It suffices to say
‘Legenda sancti Henrici’, Heikkilä (ed.), vi, 266–7: “Digitus martyris gloriosi
in hyeme abscisus longe post in vere, cum ubique glacies tota liquefacta et resoluta
est, corvo super ipsum crocitante, cum annulo ipsius est inventus in particula glaciei
[emphasis mine]”. It is interesting to note that the piece of frozen water acts as
a preservative for St Henry’s finger, similarly as sea waters do in the case of St
Adalbert’s: ‘De sancto Adalberto episcopo’, Perlbach (ed.), 17, 1183: “que hospicio
sancti, ubi martirizatus est, erat contigua”.
67
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
239
that the feast of the dedication of the Turku cathedral was celebrated
on June 17th, and the transfer of the relics on June 18th. In this
light the invention of the miracle about the convenient finding of the
finger and the ring should be interpreted as an example of a blatant
insistence on the episcopal succession of the chapter of Turku.68
Little is known about the subsequent veneration of St Henry’s
finger, almost as little as in the case of St Adalbert’s finger, of which
virtually no traces remain. It seems that the miracula from the Legenda
were featured in the sung liturgy from the late thirteenth century on.
Otherwise it is the iconographic evidence that sheds some light on
the importance of his digit. The first is the depiction of the miracle
included in the engraved brass plate of St Henry’s sarcophagus that
was ordered from Flanders in the 1420s by the church in Nousiainen.
The fact that such a costly object was installed there, the traditionally
first Finnish bishopric, and not in Turku, where the relics of the saint
resided at the time, should not be surprising though. By the early
fifteenth century Nousiainen was not a competition, but a complement
to the power of the Turku bishops, which marked out the cultural
niche of their patron saint.69
On one of the side panels of the tomb the spectators could see
a disproportionally large, elongated finger with a ring resting on a big
piece of ice floating in the middle of the river and being guarded
by the raven mentioned in the Legenda (Fig. 3). By consulting the
cover of the sarcophagus on which the portrait of a fully-vested St
Henry embedded in a lavish Gothic portal is presented, one can
conclude that the digit on the ice is not the ring finger, but that
the middle finger of the right palm is the one on which the bishop
wears the sign of his dignity in the depiction. In addition, the side
panel also features a presumably peasant couple at the moment of
inventio, standing in a row boat floating in the middle of the river.
68
Tuomas Heikkilä, ‘Tracing the Heavenly Pater Patriae of Medieval Finland’, in
Marika Räsänen, Gritje Hartmann, and Earl Jeffrey Richards (eds.), Relics, Identity and
Memory in Medieval Europe (Turnhout, 2016), 225–54; Heikkilä, Sankt Henrikslegenden,
57–64; Jarl Gallén, ‘Till historien om St. Henriks reliker och hans grav i Nousis’,
Finskt Museum (1972), 33–8; Bertil Nilsson, ‘Några anteckningar till frågan om Åbo
domkyrkas invigning’, Historisk tidskrift för Finland, 102 (2017), 662–92; Immonen
and Taavitsainen, ‘Finger of a saint, thumb of a priest’, passim and more generally,
Ellis Nilsson, Creating Holy People, 87–8, 197–201.
69
Heikkilä, Sankt Henrikslegenden, 165–8.
240
Wojtek Jezierski
The man, turned to the praying woman, points to the relic resting
on the ice. As regards the above-mentioned theme of popularization,
the medieval spectator did not only see the relic finger, but s/he saw
it as seen. In other words, the relic was presented already in a context
of a popular testimony and proof of sanctity, embedded in a normative gesture and signifying the devout attitude the spectator should
assume towards it.70
Fig. 3. St Henry’s finger on
the saint’s fifteenth-century
brass cenotaph in the Nousiainen church (Source: Museiverket, Finland; Wikimedia Commons, Creative commons license; photo: Tuomas
Heikkilä)
The other depictions of St Henry’s finger are included in the Missale
Aboense, printed in 1488, on which the bishop holds in his hands
a book with his own finger relic resting on it.71 The imagery stressing
the apostolic succession and episcopal dignity derived from the saint
proved so strong that it survived the Reformation and the rejection of
the cult of the relics in Scandinavia, e.g. by being used on the seal
of the Lutheran bishops of Turku from 1618 (Fig. 4).72
Hahn, ‘Seeing and Believing’, passim; Hahn, ‘What Do Reliquaries Do?’,
passim; C. Stephen Jaeger, Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the
West (Philadelphia, 2012), 125–30.
71
The image from the Missale Aboense can be consulted here: https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Missale_Aboense_cropped.jpg.
72
Heikkilä, Sankt Henrikslegenden, 106–9; Heikkilä, ‘Tracing the Heavenly Pater
Patriae’, 232–5.
70
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
241
Fig. 4. St Henry’s finger on the seal of the
Bishopric of Turku/Åbo,
1618 (Source: https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
File:Henrik_sormi.JPG,
Wikimedia Commons,
Creative commons license)
VII
GNIEZNO UNDER PRESSURE
It is beyond doubt that the invention of St Adalbert’s finger imitated
the wider traditions of the veneration of saints’ relics (among which
fingers were very typical) included in lists of relics in the contemporary
north-eastern peripheries and generally all over Europe from the early
to the late Middle Ages. In contrast to the two examples presented here,
the ring finger story of St Adalbert did not inspire any iconographical
following, however.73 Neither before nor after the composition of the
Tempore illo and the Miracula can we find depictions of St Adalbert
being identified by his ring in any specific way.74 Nor did any high
medieval depiction of the saint hone in on his severed relic finger, let
73
This motif about the fish ring from the Tempore illo seems to have inspired
a great deal of hagiographical stories about other saints, including St Stanislaus,
in later medieval Polish culture: Starnawska, Świętych życie po życiu, 93–7.
74
For the iconographical corpus regarding St Adalbert, see Wojciech Danielski,
Kult św. Wojciecha za ziemiach polskich (Lublin, 1997); Alicja Karłowska-Kamzowa,
‘Wyobrażenia św. Wojciecha w sztuce polskiej XII–XX wieku. Warianty ujęć
ikonograficznych’, in Zofia Kurnatowska (ed.), Tropami Świętego Wojciecha (Poznań,
1999), 355–71.
242
Wojtek Jezierski
alone the fish swallowing it. And since any external inspirations of
this miracle story that would help determine its imitative character are
difficult to identify, we should see it as an original, even if absolutely
apocryphal and fantastic, take on the motifs of episcopal fingers that
was conceived by the Gniezno milieu, which eventually represents
a blind alley in how the cultivation of the saint developed.
As the examples from the Scandinavian detour clearly show, however,
such renewed mythopoetic investments into missionary beginnings
and inventions of episcopal relics and rings usually occurred during
periods of institutional identity crises, for which the reconfigured
connection to the holy founder was a remedy. It is thus worth asking
what crisis this particular adaptation was addressing, other than the
above-sketched speculative connection of St Adalbert with the ruling
dynasty? Was there some other selective cultural pressure that led to
taking and eventually abandoning this path of evolution represented
by the saint’s bejewelled member?
It has been suggested that the invention of new miracles and
relics of St Adalbert in the twelfth century, as well as the intensified
spreading of his cult across the Gniezno’s diocese in the second half
of the thirteenth century, might have been triggered by the unusual
proliferation of the cult of the martyr-bishop St Stanislaus (d. 1079) in
the Cracow diocese after his canonization in 1253.75 This suggestion
seems particularly convincing for the late thirteenth century, during
the archiepiscopate in Gniezno of Jakub Świnka (1283–1314), who
witnessed Cracow’s growing influence. The archbishop was an unusually vehement sponsor of the cult of St Adalbert and in 1285 included
him among the statues that he gave after the synod in Łęczyca. One
of their provisions explicitly stipulated that each and every cathedral
and monastic church in Gniezno province should receive a written
version of St Adalbert’s vita to be read annually as commemoration
of the transfer of his relics on 20 October, which suggests that this
was not the usual case.76 It is not a wild guess that the Miracula
Plezia, ‘Wstęp’, in W kręgu żywotów św. Wojciecha, 201–2; Gábor Klaniczay,
‘Saints’ Cults in Medieval Europe: Rivalries and Alliances’, in Nils Holger Petersen,
Anu Mänd, Sebastián Salvadó, and Tracey R. Sands (eds.), Symbolic Identity and the
Cultural Memory of Saints (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2018), 21–41, here 22–27.
76
Kodeks dyplomatyczny Wielkopolski, i, (Poznań, 1877), no. 551, 510–15, here
511: “Item statuimus, ut in omnibus ecclesiis nostre provincie kathedralibus et
conventualibus hystoria beati Adalberti habeatur in scriptis, et at omnibus usitetur
75
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
243
sancti Adalberti might exactly be this updated and adapted “hystoria
beati Adalberti” stipulated by the statutes, which would narrow down
its dating to the decade following the synod (1285–95). Furthermore,
Archbishop Świnka’s close relation to St Adalbert is suggested by
one particular object: his episcopal ring, which would additionally
explain the Miracula author’s preoccupation with the finger story.
This unusual, magnificent octagonal golden ring with a large topaz
has been dated to mid-thirteenth century. Its late Romanesque iconography features two figures on each side of the ring; on one side
a female figure holds her palm in a gesture of oath-taking, which has
therefore been interpreted as a personification of fides. The other side
features a diagonally dissected image of a bishop, commonly interpreted
as St Adalbert.77
The ring-related inspirations of the Miracula do not end here. If
the rapidly spreading cult of St Stanislaus really did act as a selective
pressure behind the mythopoetic co-evolution of St Adalbert and the
Gniezno milieu, it is in the context of the Cracow bishop’s canonization
that additional explanations of this story can be found. After all, the
archbishops of Gniezno were deeply engaged in this process ever since
its inception in 1249 until the successful canonization of the second
patron saint of Poland in 1253.78 In contrast to St Adalbert, whose
rather informal canonization in 999 tightly followed his martyrdom,79
St Stanislaus was a modern saint who had to undergo the full vetting
process commanded by the new model of curial canonization put into
place in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, which was
reaching the Baltic Rim at that time.80 This entailed the attestation of
et cantetur.”; Jadwiga Karwasińska, ‘Drzwi gnieznieńskie a rozwój legendy o św. Wojciechu’, in Gerard Labuda (ed.), Święty Wojciech w polskiej tradycji historiograficznej
(Warszawa, 1997), 271–89, here 283.
77
Bogacka, Insygnia biskupie, figs. 18–20, 90–1, 104, 121; http://muzeumag.
com/wystawa/wystawa-stala-slidebar/.
78
Gerard Labuda, Święty Stanisław, biskup krakowski, patron Polski (Poznań, 2000),
156–60.
79
Petr Kubín, ‘Svatořečení biskupa Vojtĕcha’, in Józef Dobosz (ed.), Kościół
w monarchiach Przemyślidów i Piastów (Poznań, 2009), 99–103.
80
Haki Antonsson, ‘Saints and relics in early christian Scandinavia’, Medieval
Scandinavia, 15 (2005), 51–80, here 77–80; Cordelia Heß, ‘Hur man skapar ett
helgon. Normering och censur i senmedeltida kanonisationsprocesser’, Historisk
tidskrift (S), 130 (2010), 191–214; see also many of the contributions in Saints
and Sainthood.
244
Wojtek Jezierski
miracles, witnesses’ lists, and documented popular veneration.81 It is
quite symptomatic in this context that the most prominent material
and miraculous agent of St Stanislaus’s posthumous healing powers
was… his episcopal ring.82 Better yet, in the run-up to the canonization
process and in response to the growing influx of afflicted pilgrims in
search of healing in the early thirteenth century, the milieu of Cracowian bishops went so far as to procure at least two such apocryphal
rings.83 Again, it is not implausible that by observing this process
from up close the Gniezno milieu realized what adaptive traits were
selected and became enticed to emulate some of St Stanislaus’s most
successful traits and transfer them to their own holy resource. Though
rather than giving St Adalbert’s physical remains a different present,
similar to the Cracowian bishop’s – a move superfluous outside the
requirements of canonization – the Gniezno milieu gave those bones
a new past to enhance their overall sanctity credentials. Competition
spurred adaptation, and in the process it transformed the identification
between the domesticator and domesticate.
If the Cracowian inspiration for St Adalbert’s fish-ring stories
is conceivable and therefore of consequence for the dating of the
Miracula sancti Adalberti, the relationship between the cult of the
martyr-bishop from Lesser Poland and the writing of the Tempore illo
is more tangential and unlikely. Although the cult of St Stanislaus took
off immediately after the transfer (translatio) of his relics in 1088, it
spread and intensified only in the years following Archbishop Thomas
Becket’s martyrdom in 1170 and after the Cracow martyr-bishop’s
renewed translatio in 1184.84 His ring miracles seem to be an invention
later still. Their attestation is traceable to the 1220s–30s, when Vita
S. Stanislai episcopi Cracoviensis (vita minor) and the Miracula S Stanislai
81
André Vauchez, Sainthood in the later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (New
York, 1997), 22–57; Cordelia Heß, Heilige machen im spätmittelalterlichen Ostseeraum:
die Kanonisationsprozesse von Birgitta von Schweden, Nikolaus von Linköping und Dorothea
von Montau (Berlin, 2008), 21–6.
82
‘Miracula sancti Stanislai’, Wojciech Kętrzyński (ed.), MPH (Warszawa, 1961),
292–318, here xiii (296), xv–xvii (297–8), xxiv (303), xxvii (306), xxxiii (310),
xxxv (311), xxxix (313), xliii (316).
83
Bogacka, Insygnia biskupie, figs. 16–17, 72, 89–90; http://www.wirtualnakatedra.
pl/altar-of-st-stanislaus-2/relikwie/pierscien-zw-sw-stanislawa/.
84
Krzysztof Skwierczyński, Recepcja idei gregoriańskich w Polsce do początku XIII wieku
(Wrocław, 2005), 238–42.
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
245
were composed, even though those stories conceivably circulated for at
least a generation given that these relics “quia ab antiquis temporibus
habebatur in opinione sanctitatis”.85
As for the cross-contamination and dissemination of forms of
cultivation of saints in the thirteenth century, it is not unthinkable
that in order to popularize St Adalbert’s veneration in Gniezno so that
it would attract as many flocking pilgrims as in Cracow, the episcopal
milieu might have entertained the idea to produce a suitable finger. If
finding a new head in 1127 was no major problem, inventing a finger
relic and perhaps even an episcopal ring a half-century or a century
later was a lesser trouble still. This, as pointed out, seems not to have
materialized, however.
Summing up, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Gniezno
bishops’ ways of cultivating St Adalbert as a resource began to resonate
with the wider European trends in how saints were to be venerated
and presented, a process that was most likely mediated and triggered
by St Adalbert’s direct competition from the cultural niche occupied by
the second most powerful Polish saint. In this new context, fama
sanctitatis regarded primarily the benefits a saint could yield for the
wider population, which shifted the concerns of saints’ relational
identities from their associations with the ruling elites to their bonds
with commoners. As shown here and as will be demonstrated in
more detail below, in the search for popular recognition of their holy
domesticate, the authors working for the episcopal milieu of Gniezno
also offered an elaborate reflection about the nature and level of
culture of the people they were taking care of in St Adalbert’s stead.
In other words, what kind of leash for the people was their bond with
the saint supposed to be?
VIII
HOSTS OF AN OFFENDED SAINT
As mentioned on the outset, in writing their accounts of St Adalbert’s
life his Polish hagiographers had an opportunity to creatively utilize
his foreign origin and alien status. Through the saint’s entrance and
confrontation with people inhabiting the outskirts of Christendom,
85
Wojciech Kętrzyński, ‘Wstęp’, MPH, iv, 244–5, 285–6; ‘Miracula sancti
Stanislai’, Kętrzyński (ed.), viii (293).
246
Wojtek Jezierski
writers could emphasize the hardships connected to his missioning
and his rejection by the visited communities. In more general terms,
it could be claimed that medieval missionaries – particularly those
who suffered martyrdom – were victims of inhospitality. As strangers
or, perhaps better, as guests to foreign regions and pagan people, their
killing by their (involuntary) hosts could be interpreted as a sui generis
sacrifice on the altar of hospitality.
Although already the early vitae of St Adalbert, in different redactions, stress the ritualistic and offertory character of his death from the
hands of the Prussians,86 nowhere is this conviction spelled out more
clearly than in the Vita altera, where Bruno states that through his martyrdom the saint became, metaphorically, a hostia.87 As stressed by Paweł
Figurski, such imagery and conceptualization were employed in order
to stress the transformative character of martyrdom and the liturgical
dimension of the identity of the martyrs killed on the shores of the Baltic
– something Bruno of Querfurt was hoping for himself.88 Almost three
centuries later, St Henry of Finland, too, was described as an ‘acceptabilis hostia’, which he became through his cruel sacrificial death.89
The author(s) of his Legenda used this expression to stress St Henry’s
entering a fast-track to heavenly Jerusalem and, it seems, the transformation of identity required for him to start working miracles.
Insofar as such expressions served as a means of textual glorification
of the martyr-saints, their primary purpose seems to have been limited
to expressing the identities of individuals through their relationship to
86
Jacek Banaszkiewicz, ‘Dwie sceny z żywotów i z życia św. Wojciecha: misjonarz
i wiec Prusów, martyrium biskupa’, in Trzy po trzy o dziesiątym wieku (Kraków,
2014), 292–314.
87
Bruno of Querfurt, ‘Vita altera (redactio brevior)’, Karwasińska (ed.), 24, 62:
“Ibi ergo quia in uia sua errat, cuius longo tempore silencium exeruit missam celebat,
sacras hostia oblaturus, uiua hostia mox et ipse Christo futurus.”; 34, 69: “reuelans
Spiritus ad aures dixit, ut beati martyris Adalberti suffragia laboranti mundo imploret.
Paret ille libens montiis diunis, et intra memoriam sanctorum martyrum Adalbertum vocat, ut pro nobis erroribus divine misericordie mactata hostia intercedat”.
88
Paweł Figurski, ‘Mactata hostia. O tożsamości Brunona z Kwerfurtu oraz
„logice wizji” dla czasów ottońskich’, in Ludwik Jurek et al. (eds.), Ja – my – oni.
Tożsamości ludzi średniowiecza (Warszawa, 2012), 67–84; see also Sosnowski, Studia
nad wczesnymi, 107–14.
89
‘Legenda sancti Henrici’, Heikkilä (ed.), 4, 264–5: “Sic sacerdos domini,
acceptabilis hostia divinis oblata conspectibus, occumbens pro iusticia, templum
superne Iherusalem cum gloriosi palma triumphi feliciter introivit”.
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
247
God. Such an approach was perfectly understandable in the case of the
first two hagiographers of St Adalbert. After all, their main concerns
regarded his personal sanctity, and Canaparius and Bruno wrote their
texts too early and from too-distant locations or external points of view
to take any deeper interest in the relational identification between the
saint and his Polish ecumene. However, in the second, domestic, wave
of hagiographical writing, something else was at stake when it came
to the sacrifice of this particular hostia on the altar of inhospitality:
the transformation of the hosts and not so much of their guest.90
Although still writing about the personal qualities of the saint, these
later authors dispensed with liturgical metaphors and both shifted
and widened the focus of his missionary hardships. In so doing they
put more stress on the relationship between St Adalbert and the
Polish populace, though in a way that was neither uncomplicated nor
straightforwardly beneficial. The following, entirely fabricated, visit
to Poland narrating the missionary hardships of St Adalbert in the
Tempore illo is telling in this respect.
As the Christi adletha was travelling through Poland he came to
a village where he asked some peasants for directions to Gniezno.
However, “the inhabitants of this place, hearing how much his speech
differed from the Polish, could not contain their laughter or derision,
especially when they saw his monastic clothes, something they had
never seen before”.91 In spite of his inquires they refused to speak to
90
It is often forgotten that the notion of hostia belongs to the semantic field of
hospitality: Émile Benveniste, Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, trans.
Elizabeth Palmer (Chicago, 2016), 66: “Finally, a very well-known word, hostia,
is connected with the same family: its real sense is “the victim which serves to
appease the anger of gods, hence it denotes a compensatory offering, and herein lies
the distinction which distinguishes hostia from victima in Roman ritual”; cf. Wojtek
Jezierski, ‘Convivium in terra horroris. Helmold of Bosau’s Rituals of Hostipitality’, in
Wojtek Jezierski, Lars Hermanson, Hans Jacob Orning, and Thomas Småberg (eds.),
Rituals, Performatives, and Political Order in Northern Europe, c. 650–1350 (Turnhout,
2015), 139–73, here 148–9; Wojtek Jezierski, ‘Livonian Hospitality. The ‘Livonian
Rhymed Chronicle’ and the Formation of Identities on the Thirteenth-Century
Baltic Frontier’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 54 (2020), forthcoming.
91
‘De sancto Adalberto episcopo’, Perlbach (ed.), 10, 1181: “Indigene autem
loci illius videntes eius loquelam in plerisque sermonibus a Polonica discrepare,
nec a risu nec a derisu se continent, presertim cum ante sibi incognita monastica
eum veste indutum pro monstro spectarent”; The linguistic and cultural handicap
is a popular motif in explaining pagans’ intentions to attack missionaries. Compare
a similar situation regarding St Sigfrid’s three nephews: ‘Historia Sancti Sigfridi’,
248
Wojtek Jezierski
him, nor did they provide him with any directions. In response,
St Adalbert, “not ignited by anger, but by the holy spirit”, said: “Because
you do not want to speak for God’s honour, for His honour I command
you: stay silent!” As he left, the peasants realized they could not
open their mouths to speak and sorely regretted scorning him.92 This
scenario was repeated in the next village: St Adalbert was “likewise
loathed, and received without any kindness [humanitas]”, which left
the obnoxious peasants mute.93 It was only in the third village that
kind and helpful peasants showed him the way to Gniezno. Once in
the city, the vagrant bishop began to preach and perform miracles
and his fama sanctitatis spread like wildfire, reaching the ears of the
punished peasants. They hastened to Gniezno and “fell to his feet, and
through tears, sighs, and various gestures begged his pardon”.94 In
exchange for this submission the famulus Dei offered them forgiveness
and restored their speech. Praising the Lord they asked to be baptized.
The holy man fulfilled their wish and, prompted by their passionate
compunction, instituted an unusually long nine-week fast (rather than
the customary seven) preceding Easter.95
This fictional itinerary through the inhospitable Polish countryside
is sandwiched between two journeys to the shores of the Baltic Sea,
which in reality was just one missionary journey consisting of several
stages, as presented in both Vita prior and Vita altera.96 In the Tempore illo
Geijer, Schröder (eds.), 356: “Sed quia morem terræ et linguam non perfecte noverant,
quosdam viros nobiliores genere, et dignitate famosos, qui etiam aliis sapientiores
in tractandis negotiorum causis videbantur, sibi allexerant, et plerumque consiliis
eorum, quid eis faciendum foret, innitebantur”.
92
‘De sancto Adalberto episcopo’, Perlbach (ed.), 10, 1181: “non ira conmotus,
sed Spiritu sancto … ‘Quoniam quidem ad honorem Dei loqui noluistis, ad eius
honorem, iubeo, taceatis’. … llli autem, Deo per servum suum iubente, muti conticescunt, quia ad usum loquendi aperire ora non possunt, et qui beato viatori ostendere
viam recusarant, viam loquendi se amisisse deplorant”; Ryszard Grzesik, ‘Miasto
i wieś w hagiografii św. Wojciecha’, Ciechanowskie Studia Muzealne, 2 (1990), 9–21.
93
‘De sancto Adalberto episcopo’, 10, 1181: “itidem contemptui habitus, nulla
est humanitate susceptus”.
94
‘De sancto Adalberto episcopo’, 10, 1181: “pedibus eius advoluti, lacrimis,
gemitibus variisque nutibus veniam poscunt”.
95
This fast was cancelled by a papal legate in 1248 at the Wrocław synod, and
has thus been used as terminus ad quem for dating of the Tempore illo.
96
‘Passio Sancti Adalberti [Vita prior]’, Gaşpar (ed.), 27–30, 168–81; Bruno of
Querfurt, ‘Adalberti Pragensis episcopi et martyris: Vita altera’, redactio longior,
Karwasińska (ed.), 24–34, 29–41.
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
249
the first journey takes St Adalbert to an unnamed coastal (conceivably
Prussian) village where St Adalbert, presenting himself as coming ‘de
terra Polonorum’, is physically maltreated by one of the pagans as
he tries to convert them and is subsequently banished.97 To save his
life he returns to Poland. The second journey, after the successes in
Gniezno, takes him first to Gdańsk and to an anonymous, previously
unknown, and fictitious prince of Pomerania determined to baptize
his people, who employs St Adalbert for this task. In contrast to their
ruler, the people of Pomerania prove to be unwilling to convert. At
first they debate with St Adalbert over the advantages of polytheism,
going so far as to propose adding the holy man to their pantheon,
but they eventually reject the offer altogether. From there, finally, the
holy man proceeds to the Prussian village where he will suffer his
cruel martyrdom.98
Such a framing of St Adalbert’s interim stay in Poland is important,
as it enables the establishment of a crucial religio-political asymmetry. Taken together, this sequence of confrontations presents four
types of rejection of the holy man by his hosts in Pomerania, Poland,
and Prussia, respectively, and his ways of (not) communicating and
relating to the peoples he was converting. The implicit lesson is that
some of these hardships could be overcome, leading to missionary success and to establishing a lasting bond with the converted
people, while others could not. During the first episode, the ‘ferocious’ inhabitants of the coast have hardly any way to communicate
with the saint other than – similar to the transiently aphasiac Polish
peasants – with signs and gestures. They are physically threatening,
but they only insult the holy man.99 In contrast, the Pomeranians are
presented as non-threatening and able to both listen to and conduct
conversations with St Adalbert, but they prove to be obstinate and,
explicitly, inconvertible.100 The murderous Prussians, finally, occupy
the most extreme position. Except for the above-mentioned Prussian
neophyte, who is singled out as speaking Polish, others do not talk with
‘De sancto Adalberto episcopo’, 9, 1180–1.
Ibid., 13–16, 1182–3.
99
Ibid., 9, 1180: “mente ferocissimi”, “dedignantes et eterne vite verba
deludentes”; “deinde, quod vocem proferens indicare non poterat, signis et nutibus
aut cito fugiendum aut in tormentis moriendum esse notabat”; Peggy McCracken, In
the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France (Chicago, 2017), 63–4.
100
‘De sancto Adalberto episcopo’, 12, 1182: ‘obstinato animo’, ‘inconvertibiles’.
97
98
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Wojtek Jezierski
St Adalbert at all – contrary to what is reported in the Vita prior and
Vita altera. Instead they are said to be furious, speaking in insane
voices and barking like dogs.101 They are, in other words, the savages
who cannot be reached, the utter negation.102
Against this backdrop of (in-)communicability, the yet unconverted
Polish peasants are not presented through epithets like the other
peoples. Admittedly, they do appear as rude and inhospitable, but
it is possible to communicate with them, even if they ridicule their
interlocutor’s speech. In other words, lacking in humanitas they are
still imperfect and it is the confrontation with the saint that puts them
on the path to salvation. In the process, however, both parties make
some type of sacrifice: St Adalbert becomes offended, whereas the
boorish peasants are temporally struck dumb, i.e. fall down briefly on
the hierarchy of beings.103 Additionally, in order to fully and lastingly
bond with their new saint, they also have to permanently alter their
eating habits.
This crisis is necessary to establish a special communion between
the saint and his Polish hosts, one which no other people can enjoy
and which, from then on, becomes facilitated by a fully transparent
communication between the parties. The role of St Adalbert is thus
repeatedly presented as that of master intercessor and instrument
of divine intervention, who reestablishes the humanitas, that is, both
kindness and, literally, the very humanity of his new subjects.104
101
‘De sancto Adalberto episcopo’, 15–16, 1182–3: ‘insanis vocibus’, ‘rabido
latratu’, ‘insani’, ‘furentes’; ‘limphata mente’; Miłosz Sosnowski, ‘“Prussians as
Bees, Prussians as Dogs”: Metaphors and the Depiction of Pagan Society in the
Early Hagiography of St. Adalbert of Prague’, Reading Medieval Studies, 39 (2013),
25–48; see also Ian Wood, ‘Where the Wild Things Are’, in Walter Pohl, Clemens
Gantner, and Richard Payne (eds.), Visions of Community in the Post-Roman World.
The West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, 300–1100 (Farnham, 2012), 531–42.
102
Hayden White, ‘Forms of Wildness: The Archeology of an Idea’, in Tropics
of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978), 150–82; McCracken, In
the Skin of a Beast, 130–1.
103
McCracken, In the Skin of a Beast, 54; Agamben, The Open, 33–8, 77; Daniel
Heller-Roazen, Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (New York, 2008), 121–33;
this, too, was a popular motif in miracle stories: Turbach, Index exemplorum, nos.
4560–4566, 347.
104
‘De sancto Adalberto episcopo’, 9, 1180–1: “non ira conmotus, sed Spiritu
sancto”; “Deo per servum suum iubente”; “per suum famulum Christus”; “Unde
ego servus eius … in eiusdem nomine Ihesu Christ, videlicet domini nostri Creatoris
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
251
Furthermore, his miraculous powers and proselytizing activity spatially
privilege Gniezno as the centre of the cultural niche of the saint and
the apostolic rock of Poland, radiating to the neighbouring regions.105
Just as with ‘the apostles and prophets’, in order to make this arrangement permanent St Adalbert’s individual charisma was immediately
institutionalized by him personally appointing his successor, Gaudentius.106 As a matter of fact, this fragment is further developed in
the Miracula and the saint turns out to be quite similar to St Sigfrid
or St Henry. Like his Scandinavian foils, he too is a latecomer who,
in retrospect, begins to be presented as the person who originally
christened his people: “Thanks to God’s spirit speaking and working
his many miracles through St Adalbert, the whole of Poland accepted
the Christian faith”.107
omnium”; “fidelis dispensator Christi”; Reinhart Koselleck, ‘The Historical-Political
Semantics of Asymmetric Counterconcepts’, in Futures Past. On the Semantics of
Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York, 2004), 155–90, here 157–84.
105
For more on the relationship between St Adalbert and Gniezno, see Miłosz
Sosnowski, ‘Est in parte regni ciuitas magna – św. Wojciech w Gnieźnie’, in Tomasz
Janiak (ed.), Chrzest – św. Wojciech – Polska. Dziedzictwo średniowiecznego Gniezna
(Gniezno, 2016), 39–58.
106
‘De sancto Adalberto episcopo’, 11, 1182: “Sancto igitur Spiritu per famulum
suum predicante multaque illic signa mirabiliter faciente, christianam legem
Polonia gratanter universa suscipit, sanctique instituta viri ovanter amplectens,
supra firmam petram fundari meruit. Vir namque sanctus fundamentum apostolorum
et prophetarum ibi stabilire cupiens, quendam christianissimum virum, sui socium
laboris et itineris, Gaudencium nomine ibidem archiepiscopum pro se constituit,
quia ipse videlicet ad alias regiones paganorum festinabat, quas lucrifacere Christo
nichilominus anelabat”. [emphasis mine]; 20, 1184: “desiderabiles reliquias 8. Idus
Novembris in metropolim sollempnissime transtulit ubi ad eius tumulum quam
plurima divinitus per eum parantur beneficia omnibus”; cf. Kersken, ‘God and the
Saints’, 170–2.
107
‘Miracula Sancti Adalberti’, 4, 31: “Spiritu ergo dei per beatum Adalbertum
predicante, multa miracula faciente, fidem christianam tota Polonia suscepit”; It
could be claimed that the authors only suggest that the saint was only involved in
the processes of Christanization and conversion, that is, a deepening of the belief
of the nominally Christian people already reached by the mission. It seems more
probable to assume that they purposefully exploits the ambivalence between these
processes to antedate the missionary efforts of the saint, thereby boosting his, and
thereby Gniezno’s, authority. On the conceptual differences between Christianization,
mission, and conversion see Wood, Missionary Life, 3; Miłosz Sosnowski, ‘Strategia
misyjna ad gentes na łacińskim Zachodzie – dylematy i rozwiązania’, in Józef Dobosz,
252
Wojtek Jezierski
IX
ST ADALBERT BETWEEN TAMING AND DOMESTICATION
The nine-weeks fast, rather than ordinary seven, becomes therefore
the fundamental and lasting sign of this transformed relationship,
tacitly mediated by the Gniezno bishops, between the holy man and
the Polish people. It is a truly mythopoetic moment:
They accepted this precept most eagerly; willingly observed it in their own
lives and took care so that their descendants also observed it. For this reason
until today people all over Poland most piously and inviolately observe this
rule, as if it was instituted by the apostles, although this consists only of
abstaining from eating meat for two weeks preceding Lent.108
In order to better grasp the mutualistic character of the socioreligious contract between the saint and the Polish people, something
that was denied to other people visited by St Adalbert, we can again
resort to the perspective of domestication proposed in this work.
This regards particularly a sharper conceptual distinction between
taming and domestication.109 Although often seen as synonymous and
interchangeable, the senses of these terms are very different. Taming is
a modification of behavior of an individual specimen. Domestication, on
the other hand, comprises “a permanent genetic modification of a bred
lineage that leads to, among other things, a heritable predisposition
toward human association”, almost always entailing, among others,
Jerzy Strzelczyk, and Marzena Matla (eds.), Chrystianizacja “Młodszej Europy” (Poznań,
2017), 221–49, here 223; more generally: Christopher Abram, ‘The Two “Modes of
Religiosity” in Conversion-Era Scandinavia’, in Ildar Garipzanov (ed.), Conversion
and Identity in the Viking Age (Turnhout, 2014), 21–48.
108
‘De sancto Adalberto episcopo’, 10, 1181–2: “Precepit itaque illis vir Dei,
ut novem septimanas ante pascha unoquoque anno ita custodiant, sicut ceteri
fideles christiani generali abstinentia septem ebdomadas rite observant. Quod
illi preceptum desiderantissime suscipientes et in vita libenter custodierunt et
posteritati custodiendum tradere curaverunt. Nec frustra, namque et in presens
usque tempus eadem abstinencia per universam Poloniam devotissime observatur
et, quasi ab apostolis id traditum sit, inviolabiliter colitur et tenetur, ita tamen, ut per
duas ebdomadas precedentes ab esu duntaxat carnium se custodian” [emphasis
mine]; On this extraordinary fast see Roman Michałowski, ‘The Nine-Week Lent
in Boleslaus the Brave’s Poland. A Study of the First Piasts’ Religious Policy’, Acta
Poloniae Historica, lxxxix (2004), 5–50.
109
McCracken, In the Skin of a Beast, 37–67.
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
253
a profound change in diet.110 Thus, metaphorically speaking the pious
observation of this extraordinary fast concurrently commemorated the
transgressions of the rude ancestors and constituted an inheritable
predisposition of future generations towards association with the
saint and his locus.111 The fast linked the present to the past, thus
becoming a lasting bond between the domesticator (St Adalbert) and
the domesticate (the Polish people) in the form of a recurring dietary
restraint, which both in imaginary and historical terms was unique
in its rigour.112 Even decades after its cancellation in 1248 – given
the Miracula’s late thirteenth-century provenance – the reminiscence
of this fast was still the symbol of the covenant between the saint
and his chosen people; an erased but still visible trace of a privileged
relationship and distinction vis-à-vis others.113
In contrast to the Poles, the other people mentioned in this fragment
did not undergo the same type of durable transformation. With the
110
Carlos A. Driscoll, David W. Macdonald, and Stephen J. O’Brien, ‘From
wild animals to domestic pets, an evolutionary view of domestication’, Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 106 (2009), 9971–8, here 9972:
“Taming is conditioned behavioral modification of an individual; domestication
is permanent genetic modification of a bred lineage that leads to, among other
things, a heritable predisposition toward human association”; Scott, Against the
Grain, 76–86, 166–9, 180–2, 220–2; On how domestication impacts diet see also
Harari, Sapiens, 85–95, 104–7.
111
‘De sancto Adalberto episcopo’, 9, 1181: “Sanctitatem tuam, serve Dei
omnipotentis, unanimiter inploramus, ut pro tanta iniuria, quam tibi furiosa et ceca
mente intulimus, aliquid rigidum nobis iniungas, quod ad memoriam posterorum
nostrarum tempore perferamus, quia pro reatus nostri magnitudine nondum digne
puniti sumus.”
112
McCracken, In the Skin of a Beast, 58–9; It is somewhat ironic that it was
Bolesław I the Brave – the actual prime punisher, castrator, and violent tamer of the
Polish people – who introduced this extraordinary fast; Michałowski, ‘The Nine-Week
Lent’, 5–9, 34–6, 41–6; cf. Thietmar von Merseburg, Chronicon, Holzmann (ed.), viii,
2–3, 495–6: “Populus enim suus [Bolesław I’s] more bovis est pascendus et tardi
ritu asini castigandus et sine poena gravi non potest cum salute principis tractari.
Si quis in hoc alienis abuti uxoribus vel sic fornicari presumit, hanc vindicatae
subsequentis poenam protinus sentit. In pontem mercati is ductus per follem
testiculi clavo affigitur et novacula prope posita hic moriendi sive de his absolvendi
dura ellecio sibi datur. Et quicumque post LXX. carnem manducasse invenitur,
abcisis dentibus graviter punitur.”
113
Michałowski, ‘The Nine-Week Lent’, 46–9; Kersken, ‘God and the Saints’,
passim; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1997), 46–67, 75, 123.
254
Wojtek Jezierski
exception of the insane, feral Prussians, they could be tamed at best. As
pointed out by Émile Benveniste, the distinction between taming and
domestication is preserved in the Latin verb domo, domāre (to do violence,
to oppress, to subject) which, counterintuitively, is semantically distinct
from domus. Instead, both etymologically and culturally it reaches deep
into conceptualizations of practices of subjugation and domination,
which only later became associated with the taming of animals
and which originally were unrelated to the question of households.114
This politico-linguistic distinction between taming and domestication
was not unknown in twelfth-century Poland. As Gallus Anonymous
expressed this in a song praising Bolesław III the Wrymouth, which
he put into the mouths of the German troops fighting the prince in
1109: “He would well deserve a kingdom, nay even imperial rights/
who can tame [domabat] such hordes of warriors with a handful of his
knights!”.115 Also Bolesław I the Brave received a similar praise for
his conquests east of the Saale: “He subjugated [edomuit – tamed] the
valour of the indomitable [indomitos – literally: untameable] Saxons”.116
Correspondingly, Bolesław III’s early twelfth-century campaigns against
the Pomeranians, the traces of which are visible in the Tempore illo, were
wars of taming, conquest and domination, though followed up with
missionary efforts.117 However, these people were not included into
his polity because of that. None of these conquests led to any of those
people inhabiting even the most broadly conceived domus Bolezlai – this
type of violent taming did not automatically entail domestication.
The final point relates to what this new social contract says in terms
of how imitative or original the invented beginnings of the episcopal
identity in Gniezno and the successors’ ties to their founder were.
As already quoted, the author is unequivocal in this regard: “For this
reason until today people all over Poland most piously and inviolately
114
Benveniste, Dictionary of Indo-European, 250–1; Émile Benveniste, ‘Homophones
radicales en Indo-Européen’, Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique, 51 (1955), 14–41,
here 15–29; Scott, Against the Grain, 248–56.
115
Gallus Anonymous, Gesta principum Polonorum, Knoll and Schaer (eds.), iii,
11, 242–3: “Talem virum condeceret regnum et imperium,/Qui cum paucis sic
domabat tot catervas hostium.”
116
Gallus Anonymous, Gesta principum Polonorum, i, 6, 32–3: “Indomitos vero
tanta virtute Saxones edomuit, quod in flumine Sale in medio terre eorum meta
ferrea fines Polonie terminavit.”
117
Karol Maleczyński, Bolesław III Krzywousty (Wrocław, 1975), 125–202.
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
255
observe this rule, as if [quasi] it was instituted by the apostles”. Tellingly, the author of the Miracula follows the exact same line of thinking.
Through St Adalbert’s actions as well as through his extraordinary fast;
it was “as if [veluti] through one of the apostles the whole of Poland
found a firm fundament on the apostolic rock”.118 Quasi, veluti – the
consistent use of these qualifying adverbs unmistakably demonstrates
the self-imposed limits on Gniezno’s fantasy of the apostolic prerogatives on the north-eastern peripheries, which nonetheless could not
eschew apostolic mimesis altogether.119 Similarly, in St Sigfrid’s case,
though his arrival to Scandinavia was displayed with quasi-biblical
suggestions and apostolic overtones, he never actually received the
latter title explicitly. Instead he rather drew his institutional authority
from the archiepiscopal see of York, just like St Henry drew his from
Uppsala.120 To put it in a different way, missionaries arriving to these
peripheries and founding fathers of those institutions were quite
self-consciously presented as only very distant echoes of the apostles.
They were covers and adaptations rather than the original songs.
X
CONCLUDING REMARKS: HOLY HUSBANDRY & VICARIOUS
APOSTOLATE ON THE PERIPHERY
In his Easter sermon devoted to John 12:24, the exiled Bishop of
Exeter, Ralph Brownrigg (aka Brownrig; 1642–59) employed a fortunate
phrase – the holy husbandry – to explain the paradox of how the
Christ’s death, like that of a single kernel thrown onto fertile ground,
can lead to an abundant harvest in the form of mass salvation.121
118
‘Miracula Sancti Adalberti’, Kętrzyński (ed.), 4, 31: “et fundata est veluti per
unum de apostolis super apostolice fidei firmam petram.” [emphasis mine].
119
Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 49, fn. 13.
120
‘Historia Sancti Sigfridi’, Geijer, Schröder (eds.), 350, 356; Toni Schmid,
‘St Sigfrid’, in John Granlund (ed.), Kulturhistoriskt lexikon för nordisk medeltid, xv
(Malmö, 1970), 185–7; see however Toni Schmid, Den helige Sigfrid (Lund, 1931),
116 fn. 1; ‘Legenda sancti Henrici’, 1–3, 254–61.
121
Ralph Brownrig, Forty Sermons (London, 1661), sermon III, 259–60: “Husbandmen do not sow one grain of Wheat, but a greater quantity, … but here, in this holy
Husbandry, Christ speaks but of one grain of Wheat cast into the earth”, “Every
grain of God’s feed-corn shall rise again. Tis not so in your ordinary Husbandry:
… but every grain of this holy husbandry shall spring up, and fructifie. Curat
singulos, sicut universos.”
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Wojtek Jezierski
Although the bishop’s metaphorical inclinations were decisively more
horticultural, his expression well captures also the type of cultivation
of sacrosanct livestock practiced by episcopal milieus inhabiting the
outer orbits of high medieval Christianity.
In the hands of those milieus of both Central and North-Eastern
Europe, saints proved to be a powerful and versatile means of both
institutional mythopoesis and ways of tying their believers to the loca
sanctorum those institutions represented. The way the role of martyrsaints in the holy husbandry was practiced in those regions studied
here may seem self-contradictory however, as it presents saints as both
domesticates and domesticators. This inconsistency is only apparent,
as it attests to the multiplicity of positions occupied by the holy
wo/men. In certain respects they were treated as target objects of
initial taming, primarily because of their outsider status. Through the
transfers of their remains, which often included important stopovers at
institutions tied to the bishopric in question, and through the erection
of episcopal cathedrals their peregrinations were arrested, anchored
in a specific place, and attached to a concrete institution or group.
It seems that in the specific case of St Adalbert we can speak of
two parallel lines of taming, one secular and one episcopal – that is,
appropriations of his remains and utilizing him as a sign of identity
and means of political and institutional recognition. This parallelism
should not be overstated though, as it most likely involved as much
competition as collaboration between those two groups.122
Still, this duality makes the Polish case both original and exceptional
with respect to the examples from the north-eastern peripheries,
where ruling elites in almost all countries had at their disposal two
types of patron saints, dynastical and ecclesiastical, functioning next
to each other; such as the holy Dioscuri, St Henry and St Erik did in
Sweden.123 Nor did Poland have a counterpart to someone like St Olaf
Compare the cooperation between the secular and ecclesiastical elites trying,
in vain, to establish the archbishopric of Prague under St Adalbert’s aegis in the
eleventh century: Martin Wihoda, ‘Pražské arcibiskupství svatého Vojtĕcha’, in
Dobosz (ed.), Kościół w monarchiach Przemyślidów i Piastów, 205–17; Wihoda, První
česká království, 159.
123
Christian Oertel, The Cult of St Erik in Medieval Sweden (Turnhout, 2016),
50, 114–115, 136–46, 204–6, 231; Gábor Klaniczay, ‘Conclusions: North and East
European Cults of Saints in Comparison with East-Central Europe’, in Antonsson
and Garipzanov (eds.), Saints and Their Lives, 283–304.
122
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
257
functioning as the rex perpetuus Norvegiæ. Instead, St Adalbert operated
as an unusual hybrid of these two types. St Adalbert stands out against
the western background too, where apostolic martyr-saints almost
never attained such prominent positions of patronage, and therein
lies his undeniable originality against these two backgrounds. This
ultimate fusion of St Adalbert’s two functions – dynastical and ecclesiastical – is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that the story of the
Gniezno summit – so important for the Piasts but consciously erased
from the Tempore illo – made its way back into the saint’s hagiography
as the final chapter of the Miracula sancti Adalberti, composed in the
run-up to the political consolidation of the Polish lands at the end of
the thirteenth century.124
Once St Adalbert assumed a sedentary lifestyle and inhabited
a niche of sacred geography with its centre in Gniezno, the peripheries,
and areas of prospective evangelization, the symbiosis and mutual
identification between him and his episcopal successors began to
evolve into a transgenerational bond of domestication. Sometimes
this co-evolution led to physical adaptations, such as when the holy
domesticates suddenly evolved new limbs and appendages. In this
context, it seems, the history of St Adalbert’s finger is an example of
maladaptation. First, around the turn of the millennium there was no
finger at all. Then in the twelfth century a finger floated up, only to be
further specified as the episcopal ring-finger in the thirteenth century.
And finally, there was merely the absence of the finger. This transition
from nothing, to an indefinite a, to a certain the, and back to nothing
again is the story of an attempted, but ultimately unsuccessful, fixation
of an episcopal attribute and a material stand-in for the association
between the martyr-saint and Gniezno bishopric.125 It was a fiasco
compared to the successes of similar efforts in Turku and Växjö.
However, after the domestication through stories and objects of cult,
the episcopal milieus employed holy men as imaginary domesticators
of the people for whose cura animarum they were responsible. The
projections of St Adalbert as the locus of external control presented
him as the agent of holy husbandry and the prime tamer of the Polish
people through miraculous healings and exceptional fasts – the latter
‘Miracula Sancti Adalberti’, 9, 36–8.
Franco Moretti, ‘Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British
Novels, 1740–1850)’, Critical Inquiry, 36 (2009), 134–58, here 146.
124
125
258
Wojtek Jezierski
being a sign of the uniquely rigorous piety in Poland. Eventually, after
the saint – counterfactually – founded his own archbishopric, he was
transformed into an absent sovereign in whose stead the Gniezno
bishops operated.126 Seen in this light, his original missionary efforts
in Prussia and Pomerania paled somewhat as the covenant between
the saint and his chosen people came more to the fore.
As to the question of imitation or originality of the Polish politicoreligious culture, this study offers somewhat complex conclusions.
The similarities with St Henry and St Sigfrid, two saints with largely
made-up pedigrees and life stories, suggest that in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries St Adalbert, irrefutably a historical and welldocumented figure, was also undergoing a process of secondary
mythologization, which took wide liberties from whatever initial
information was available about him in order to update his image to
meet current needs. The general tendency of these secondary hagiographical waves – roughly a century and a half after the actual or
imagined death of a saint – was that a legendary tone and fabrications
were a much more viable means of mythopoesis than accurate details.
The latecomers’ advantage was that the less was there to begin with,
the less restricted was the fantasy, as the authors of the legendae of
St Henry and St Sigfrid would surely concede. The new, fantastical
aspects of the late lives of St Adalbert, perhaps due to the relative
abundance of prior information, seemed more moderate in comparison.
The legitimizing benefits of secondary mythologization came at
a cost, however. The most salient effect was the smoothing out of the
edges as well as evaporation of individual idiosyncrasies of the holy
men, who fell prey to the standards of sainthood circulating in the
twelfth and thirteenth century Europe. Those mythopoetical adaptations, galvanized by ever more stringent requirements of canonization
emanating from the central institutions of the Catholic Church, led
to the imitative use of miracle stories and ways of popular attestation
coming mainly from Western Europe, but also circulating between
the different peripheries. Put otherwise, the content of the historical and institutional claims made during these phases of secondary
mythologization may have been widely inflated – though not as much
as in Trier – but their forms of cultural expression and building blocks
were at least partially prefabricated elsewhere and appeared ever more
126
McCracken, In the Skin of a Beast, 12, 41–2, 78, 92.
Patterns of Missioning and Episcopal Power
259
isomorphic. Furthermore, the high medieval demands of popularization
posed problems for older, high-end saints like St Adalbert. The advantages of his instantaneous canonization and immediate recognition
and commodification by the ruling elites – both at home and abroad –
proved in the long run to be disadvantageous, especially on the local
level. The saint was a victim of his own early success, so to speak.
These aspects and political ties had to be toned down in his image
and replaced with other attributes and myths supposedly considered
as more attractive in the eyes of Polish pilgrims and believers.
Finally, the creation of episcopal myths on the north-eastern outskirts of Christendom entailed serious limitations as to what types of
identities and historical heritages could be asserted. Although the range
of examples studied here is very narrow, it seems that the episcopal
milieus of the younger christianitas quite self-consciously restrained
their claims of ancient apostolic authority vis-à-vis their western
counterparts, presenting it as vicarious and derivative: quasi-apostolic
and Bible-like rather than actually Biblical. They were lesser, lo-res
simulacra of their foils in the West.127 In this respect, the means of holy
husbandry practiced by the Gniezno milieu do not seem particularly
original or out of the ordinary, but fit into a wider pattern visible in
East-Central and Nordic Europe. These patterns seem not to have
resulted from direct imitation, however, but from operating under
similar conditions and constraints.
proofreading James Hartzell
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Wojtek Jezierski – notions and practices of hospitality in the Baltic Sea region;
Christianization and crusading processes; elite formation in Scandinavia; history
of emotions, political culture; associate professor at the School of Historical and
Contemporary Studies, Södertörn University and at the Department of Historical
Studies, University of Gothenburg; e-mail: wojtek.jezierski@gu.se