The Frankish Councils

In the 740s Boniface turned from converting pagans to reforming Christians. The Frankish church he found was, by his own and others’ testimony, in grave disorder: no general council had met for some eighty years, church property had been secularized, and the episcopate was worldly and undisciplined. With the backing of the Carolingian mayors Carloman and Pepin, Boniface convened a series of reforming councils, beginning with the Concilium Germanicum of 742, to restore canonical order, regularize the clergy, and bind the Frankish church to Rome. This file traces those councils, their measures, and the real but limited success they achieved.

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

The Disorder of the Frankish Church

By the time Boniface engaged it directly, the Frankish church was in a condition he regarded as scandalous. In a famous letter to Pope Zacharias, he describes a church in which no synod had been held for a long span of years — he names some eighty — in which bishoprics had been handed to greedy laymen or to clergy who lived as warriors and fornicators, and in which the canons were neglected and the discipline of the church collapsed (Tangl 50 / Emerton, Letter 45; trans. Emerton 1940; Levison 1946). The secularization of church property under Charles Martel, who had granted ecclesiastical lands to his fighting men to fund his wars, had compounded the disorder (Wood 2001; Palmer 2009). Boniface’s account is that of a reformer and must be read as such — it is a brief for reform, not a neutral survey — but its substance is corroborated: the Frankish church of the early eighth century had drifted far from canonical order, and the machinery of synodal government had fallen into disuse (Wood 2001).

The Carolingian Opportunity

The death of Charles Martel in 741 and the succession of his sons Carloman (ruling Austrasia, the eastern Frankish lands) and Pepin (ruling Neustria, the west) opened the opportunity. Unlike their father, who had used and protected Boniface but kept the church firmly subordinate to his military needs, Carloman and Pepin were prepared to sponsor reform — partly from piety, partly because a reformed, Roman-aligned church under their patronage strengthened their own legitimacy as they prepared to displace the Merovingian dynasty (Wood 2001; Palmer 2009; see The Papacy and the Carolingians). Carloman in particular sought Boniface’s help in reforming the church of his realm, and Boniface, by now the senior churchman of the German and Frankish lands and the pope’s authorized legate, was the natural instrument.

The Concilium Germanicum (742)

The reform began with the Concilium Germanicum, the “German Council,” convened by Carloman in 742 (the date is sometimes given as 743 in older scholarship) with Boniface presiding as the leading ecclesiastical authority (Tangl 56, the conciliar decree; Emerton, Letter 50; Levison 1946; Wood 2001). It was the first Frankish reforming council in living memory, and its canons set the pattern for those that followed. Its measures included: the holding of annual synods; the restoration of metropolitan authority and the subjection of bishops to canonical discipline; the prohibition of clergy from bearing arms, hunting, and keeping the company of women; the suppression of pagan and superstitious practices among the people; and the requirement that clergy be properly ordained and accountable to their bishops (Tangl 56 / Emerton, Letter 50; Levison 1946). The council also moved to address the secularized church lands, seeking — with limited success — their restoration or at least an acknowledgment that they were held only on sufferance (Wood 2001).

The Concilium Germanicum was followed by further councils in the realms of Carloman and Pepin through the mid-740s — the Council of Estinnes (743), the Synod of Soissons (744) under Pepin, and others — extending the reform across the whole Frankish church and culminating in efforts toward a general council of the combined realms (Levison 1946; Wood 2001). The cumulative programme was coherent: revive synodal government, restore the metropolitan hierarchy under archbishops bearing the pallium from Rome, discipline the clergy, root out pagan survivals, and bind the whole to the canonical order of the apostolic see.

The Limits of Reform

It would be a mistake to present this reform as an unqualified triumph, and Boniface himself did not. His letters of the later 740s are full of frustration: resistance from entrenched bishops, the difficulty of recovering secularized lands, the reluctance of the Frankish magnates and even of Pepin to press reform as far as Boniface wished, and his sense that his authority as papal legate was not always honored (Tangl 60, 78, 86 / Emerton, Letters 51, 70, 78; Emerton 1940; Wood 2001). The plan for a unified annual general council of the Frankish church did not fully take hold; the metropolitan structure Boniface envisaged was only partly realized in his lifetime; and the secularized lands were largely not recovered. Some scholars judge that the practical achievements of the councils were modest, and that their long-term significance lay less in their immediate effects than in the model they established — the precedent of a reforming, synodally-governed, Roman-aligned Frankish church that the Carolingians would develop fully under Charlemagne (Wood 2001; Palmer 2009).

Yet the model mattered enormously. The councils of the 740s reconnected the Frankish church to the discipline of synodal government and to Rome, set the agenda of clerical reform that would run through the whole Carolingian period, and established Boniface — and through him the papacy — as a force in the reform of the Western church. When Charlemagne, two generations later, presided over the great reforming legislation that shaped Latin Christendom, he was building on foundations Boniface had laid. The reform was incomplete in Boniface’s lifetime; but he had turned the Frankish church back toward order, and the turn held.

See Also

• The Papacy and the Carolingians — the dynastic and Roman politics surrounding the reform
• Bishoprics and Monasteries — the parallel organizing of the German sees
• The Correspondence — the letters documenting the reform and its frustrations
• The Commission from Rome — the legatine authority behind the councils

References

• The Letters of Saint Boniface. Trans. Ephraim Emerton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940. (Boniface to Zacharias on the disorder of the Frankish church, Letter 45; the decree of the Concilium Germanicum, Letter 50; the frustrations of reform, Letters 51, 70, 78.)
• Willibald. The Life of Saint Boniface (Vita Bonifatii). Trans. C. H. Talbot, in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954. (Boniface’s later career and reforming work.)
• Levison, Wilhelm. England and the Continent in the Eighth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946. (The councils of the 740s, their canons, and the secularization question.)
• Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050. Harlow: Longman, 2001. (The disorder of the Frankish church, the reform, and its limits.)
• Palmer, James T. Anglo-Saxons in a Frankish World, 690–900. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. (The Carolingian sponsorship of reform; the long-term significance.)