Hesse and Thuringia

After his consecration in 722, Boniface turned to the German lands east of the Rhine — Hesse and then Thuringia — where for more than a decade he preached, baptized, and founded the first churches and monastic cells of an ordered Christianity. The field was mixed: some pagans, many half-Christianized people served by clergy he judged irregular, and a population whose adherence was always entangled with Frankish power. This file traces the mission of the 720s and 730s, the method Boniface worked out with the counsel of Daniel of Winchester, and the foundations that became the seedbed of the German church.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Apostle of the Germans; martyr)

The Turn Eastward

Armed with his episcopal consecration of 722 and with letters of commendation to Charles Martel, Boniface left Rome and made his way to the Frankish court, where he obtained the mayor’s protection — a safe-conduct without which, as he later admitted, the mission was impossible (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 6; trans. Talbot 1954; on the necessity of that protection, Tangl 63 / Emerton, Letter 63). He then went to Hesse, the region between the Rhine and the lands of the still-pagan Saxons, and there began the work that would occupy the rest of his life (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 6; Talbot 1954). Hesse was a frontier: nominally within the orbit of Frankish power but only lightly Christianized, with pagan worship still openly practiced and Christian observance, where it existed, often mixed with the old cults (Clay 2010; Wood 2001).

Willibald reports that Boniface’s preaching in Hesse met with success: many thousands, he says, were baptized, and Boniface gathered converts and began to organize them (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 6; Talbot 1954). The numbers are the hagiographer’s, given in the round and not to be pressed as a census; but the substance — that Boniface established a real and growing Christian presence in Hesse in the 720s — is corroborated by the letters and by the foundations that followed (Clay 2010). It was in Hesse, at Geismar, that the most famous episode of his career took place: the felling of the sacred oak of Donar, treated in its own file (see The Felling of Donar’s Oak).

Thuringia and the Mixed Field

From Hesse Boniface extended his work into Thuringia, the region further to the east and southeast, where the situation was different and in some ways harder. Thuringia had been touched by Christianity earlier and longer, but the church there had, in Boniface’s judgment, fallen into disorder: clergy of doubtful ordination and morals, bishops who lived scandalously, practices he regarded as heretical or pagan survivals mixed into Christian observance (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 6; Talbot 1954; Tangl 50–51, Boniface’s complaints of false priests, Emerton, Letters 44, 50; Clay 2010). Here the task was as much reform and re-evangelization of nominal Christians as conversion of pagans — a distinction that runs through Boniface’s whole German enterprise and that he himself drew sharply.

The letters give this complaint a voice. Boniface writes repeatedly to Rome about clergy whose ordinations he doubts, about a priest named Aldebert and a man named Clement whom he regarded as heresiarchs leading the people astray, about baptisms performed in defective form, about pagan practices persisting under a Christian veneer (Tangl 57, 59 / Emerton, Letters 50, 52; Emerton 1940; Levison 1946). The German mission, on the evidence of the letters, was not a clean march of conversion but a grinding labor against disorder — pagan resistance on one side, irregular and resistant Christian clergy on the other, and always the dependence on Frankish power that made the whole thing possible and constrained it.

The Method

How did Boniface go about it? The sources let us reconstruct a method, much of it worked out in consultation with Daniel, bishop of Winchester, his old patron in England, whose advice survives in one of the most remarkable letters of the collection. Daniel counsels Boniface not to attack the pagans’ genealogies of their gods head-on by mere denunciation, but to reason with them: to ask who governed the world before the gods were born, where the gods came from, whether they still beget children, and to lead the pagans by their own logic to see the incoherence of their cults and the superiority of the one eternal God (Tangl 23 / Emerton, Letter 15; trans. Emerton 1940). This is a strikingly rationalist and irenic counsel — persuasion, not coercion — and it shows that the missionary method had a deliberate intellectual strategy behind it (Sullivan 1953; Wood 2001).

Alongside persuasion went demonstration. The felling of Donar’s Oak (see The Felling of Donar’s Oak) belongs to a different register of method: the public proof that the old gods were powerless, staged so that the watching pagans might see for themselves that the god did not strike down the man who insulted him (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 6; Talbot 1954). And alongside both went institution-building: the planting of churches and, above all, of monasteries staffed by monks and nuns brought from England, which served as permanent bases of Christian life, schools, and centers from which the surrounding country could be served (see Bishoprics and Monasteries and Fulda and the Monastic Network). Boniface understood, as the Frisian failure had taught him, that preaching without institutions did not last.

The First Foundations

The fruit of the Hessian and Thuringian mission was a network of foundations. Among the earliest was the monastery of Amöneburg in Hesse, where Boniface settled a community early in his work; another was Fritzlar, founded near Geismar, traditionally on or near the site associated with the felled oak, and entrusted to his disciple Wigbert (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 6; Talbot 1954; Clay 2010). In Thuringia he founded the monastery of Ohrdruf, where his disciple Sturm — the future founder of Fulda — was first trained (Eigil, Vita Sturmi 2; trans. Talbot 1954). These houses were the infrastructure of the new church: from them clergy were trained and supplied, the surrounding population was catechized, and the Christian presence was made permanent rather than itinerant.

By the late 730s the work had advanced far enough that Boniface could begin to think in terms not of cells and missions but of dioceses — a structured, hierarchical church with fixed sees, which he would organize in the following decade with renewed papal authorization (see Bishoprics and Monasteries). The mission of Hesse and Thuringia, with all its difficulty and its dependence on Frankish arms, had laid the foundation. Boniface had become, in fact as well as in commission, the apostle of the Germans.

References

Willibald. The Life of Saint Boniface (Vita Bonifatii). Trans. C. H. Talbot, in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954. (The protection of Charles Martel, the Hessian mission, the baptisms, and the first foundations at ch. 6.)
Eigil. The Life of Saint Sturm (Vita Sturmi). Trans. C. H. Talbot, in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954. (Sturm’s training at Ohrdruf, ch. 2.)
The Letters of Saint Boniface. Trans. Ephraim Emerton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940. (Daniel of Winchester’s counsel on method, Letter 15; complaints of false priests Aldebert and Clement, Letters 44, 50, 52; the necessity of Frankish protection, Letter 63.)
Clay, John-Henry. In the Shadow of Death: Saint Boniface and the Conversion of Hessia, 721–54. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. (The mixed religious landscape of Hesse and Thuringia; the foundations.)
Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050. Harlow: Longman, 2001. (The method and the political frame.)
Sullivan, Richard E. “The Carolingian Missionary and the Pagan.” Speculum 28 (1953): 705–740. (Persuasion and demonstration as missionary technique.)
Levison, Wilhelm. England and the Continent in the Eighth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946. (The Aldebert and Clement affair; the disorder of the clergy.)