Ansgar, Rimbert and the Forged Foundations of Hamburg-Bremen by Eric Knibbs (review)

It has long been plain that much of the written material from Hamburg-Bremen in the earlier Middle Ages was produced with a desire to distort the archdiocese’s own history and that this applied as much to documents as to narrative histories. This was due to the difficult circumstances in which the see found itself—with few or no suffragans, it clung to its claim to have archiepiscopal authority over all Scandinavia and the Slavs, a claim challenged from almost the very moment kings of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden proclaimed their peoples Christian in the late tenth and eleventh centuries. There was also the long-standing dispute with the archbishops of Cologne, from whose province the Diocese of Bremen had been removed. These themes prompted the composition of Adam of Bremen’s Gesta pontificum as well as an astounding number of forgeries and falsifications from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. All this is well known to historians of medieval Germany and Scandinavia, and skeptical voices have questioned much of the story of Hamburg-Bremen back to the very beginnings. Yet there has remained a general acceptance of the narrative presented by Rimbert’s Life of Ansgar.

What has hindered many scholars who would pursue a more skeptical line has been the daunting task of grappling with the diplomatic evidence. Eric Knibbs has not only engaged with this evidence to great effect but also communicates his findings with a clarity that makes their logic readily apparent even to those not deeply learned in the study of diplomas.

By placing Ansgar’s work in the context of the missionary (arch-)bishops before him, Knibbs finds that the story presented by the Life of Ansgar has “nothing but exceptions to offer” (p. 8). He provides an alternative account based on critical analysis of the earliest documentary sources, which Ansgar collected, modified (adding narrationes providing “the earliest narrative account of the northern mission,” p. 117), and circulated to his fellow bishops in the 840s. The layers of falsifications to the documents are identified and peeled away, and a convincing narrative emerges.

Ansgar was at first an assistant in the northern mission led by Ebo of Rheims, and as such he received a legatio from the pope in 831; after Ebo’s disgrace in 834, Ansgar was ordained a missionary bishop and granted the monastery of Turholt as a means of support by Louis the Pious. Following the division of the Frankish kingdom under Louis’s sons, Ansgar lost Turholt and sought to replace it by altering his privileges of 831 and 834 so that they appeared to found a bishopric north of the Elbe, based at the fortress of Hamburg. This was unsuccessful, but Ansgar was made bishop of the vacant see of Bremen. Not until 864 was Ansgar granted the title of missionary archbishop of the Danes and Swedes, as part of Louis the German and Pope Nicholas I’s dispute with Lothar II and Gunthar, archbishop of Cologne (whose archdiocese, in principle, encompassed Bremen as a suffragan diocese). The quarrel ended in 865 (the year of Ansgar’s death) and, with it, the political reason for Ansgar’s archiepiscopal status. For an unknown reason, Ansgar’s successor Rimbert was ordained not to Bremen but to the previously fictional see of Hamburg. He was thus forced to argue that Bremen and Hamburg had been perpetually joined, which he did through his Life of Ansgar and through falsifications added to Nicholas I’s privilege to Ansgar. It is unfortunate that Knibbs cannot explain Rimbert’s ordination to Hamburg, but the traditional story has far more weaknesses, and it is perhaps inevitable that some details must remain unexplained in this period.

This book is extremely valuable to anyone interested in the history of the Church in Scandinavia and Germany in the early-medieval period.