In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Catholic Historical Review 88.1 (2002) 1-16



[Access article in PDF]

The Bishop Builds a Bridge:
Sanctity and Power in the Medieval Pyrenees

Jeffrey A. Bowman *

[Figure]

The episcopate of Ermengol of Urgell came to an abrupt end in November 1035. After a quarter-century presiding over his diocese in the Catalan Pyrenees, Ermengol suffered a fatal accident. He had traveled to a place called Bar on the banks of the Segre, a river which descends rapidly from the high Pyrenees through the diocese of Urgell, to build a bridge. According to his biographer, Ermengol did not go to Bar to oversee the construction of the bridge, but to build the bridge himself--with his own hands. 1 Ermengol was what we might today call a hands-on administrator and what at least one of his contemporaries called an episcopus athleticus. While Ermengol was thus occupied, the bridge collapsed. The bishop tumbled into the waters of the Segre, and his skull was crushed on the rocks below.

Ermengol's career affords an especially rich opportunity to explore the image of the bishop around the year 1000 not only because Ermengol was a dynamic, long-lived administrator, but also because of the surviving sources which describe his career. Both hagiographic and diplomatic [End Page 1] sources illuminate Ermengol's episcopate. Compared with most places in contemporary Europe, eleventh-century Catalonia was a highly literate world. More than 160 records describing gifts, sales, testaments, and propertydisputes dating from Ermengol's episcopate survive. 2 These records provide valuable insight into the ways in which eleventh-century bishops administered their dioceses and cared for their flocks.

Ermengol's Vita provides another perspective. His death strengthened his already established reputation for sanctity. The year after his accident, the bishop was remembered as venerandus. 3 Within a few years of the accident at Bar, he was referred to as sanctus. By 1092 at the latest an altar, destined to remain a busy cult for centuries, had been erected in his honor. 4 His Vita, possibly composed by a canon named Borrell, is neither long nor strikingly original. The author's most notable literary accomplishment may be his dogged pursuit of puns on the word pontifex. Ermengol's biographer records the bishop's administration, his miracles, adjustments in his place of burial, and public responses to each of these. Ermengol's aspirations, accomplishments, and occasional disappointments are thus transmitted in two very different ways. We can trace his image in two distinct genres, each with its own conventions and each with its own particular strengths and weaknesses. In this case, the two images of the bishop, one transmitted in hagiography, the other in diploma, are mutually illuminating. They corroborate each other in certain respects, but each also provides valuable information lacking in the other. The Vita says little about Ermengol's family and the connections which linked him to other lay and ecclesiastical magnates throughout Catalonia and Septimania, connections which are amply documented in surviving charter material. The charters, on the other hand, tell us nothing about Ermengol's powerful preaching.

The manner of Ermengol's death was singular, and I suggest below that the tragic scene at the bridge at Bar is more than a narrative flourish--that it might provide some genuine insight into the role of the bishop in the early eleventh century. But before describing what we might learn from Ermengol's curious death, I want to suggest some of the ways in which Ermengol was not singular--some of the ways in [End Page 2] which his career resembled those of his fellow bishops in Catalonia and elsewhere.

Bishops and Counts

Ermengol was the son of the viscount of Conflent, and thus sprang from the most important vicecomital dynasty in the region. This dynasty had long enjoyed intimate, if occasionally acrimonious, relations with the cathedral and chapter of Urgell. By 996 Ermengol appears in Seu d'Urgell's documents as an archilevita. By 1002 he was archdeacon. 5 He often witnessed transactions alongside Bishop Salla, who presided over the...

pdf

Share