Fulda and the Relics

Boniface’s body, after the martyrdom at Dokkum, was carried — in accordance with what was understood to be his own wish — to Fulda, the monastery he had loved above all his foundations, and there it became the heart of one of the great cults of the medieval West. Fulda guarded his relics, the bloodstained book of his martyrdom was preserved and venerated, and “the Apostle of the Germans” grew into a national patron. This file traces the translation of the body, the relics and the famous book, and the rise of the cult that made Fulda one of the most revered shrines of Christendom.

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

The Translation to Fulda

After the killing at Dokkum on 5 June 754, the bodies of Boniface and his companions were recovered by the Christians of Frisia, and Boniface’s remains were brought first to Utrecht (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 8; trans. Talbot 1954). There a question arose over where the apostle should rest: the people of Mainz, his archiepiscopal see, and others wished to keep him, but it was understood — by a wish he had expressed in life, and confirmed in the tradition by a sign — that his body should go to Fulda, the monastery in the Hessian wilderness that he had founded through Sturm and loved above all his houses (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 8; Eigil, Vita Sturmi; Talbot 1954; see Fulda and the Monastic Network). Sturm, the abbot of Fulda, and his monks bore the body to the monastery, where it was buried with great honor (Eigil, Vita Sturmi; Talbot 1954; Levison 1946). From that burial Fulda’s greatness flowed: it was now the shrine of a martyr-founder, the resting place of the Apostle of the Germans.

The Bloodstained Book

Among the relics treasured at Fulda was the book associated with the martyrdom. The tradition, grounded in the Vita and the cult, held that Boniface had raised a book over his head as the sword fell, and that a codex preserved at Fulda — bearing what were taken to be the cuts of that sword — was the very volume (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 8; Talbot 1954; see Dokkum 754). A manuscript known as the Ragyndrudis Codex, kept at Fulda, which bears slashes consistent with the legend, has long been venerated as this martyrdom-book; whether it is literally the book of the Vita’s scene, and whether the slashes are sword-cuts, belongs to the cherished tradition rather than to the demonstrable record (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

[Disputed: the identification of the surviving Fulda *Ragyndrudis Codex* (and/or other Fulda books shown as the martyrdom-book) with the volume Boniface is said to have raised against the sword is a tradition of the cult; the codex and its cuts are real and old, but their connection to the specific gesture of 754 cannot be verified and is treated by scholars as devotional tradition pinned to its sources (Wood 2001; Palmer 2009)]. The point, for the cult and for the believer, is not the forensic question but the fittingness: the scholar-missionary who had begged for the Scriptures to be copied in gold was remembered as dying with a book in his hands, and Fulda preserved the book as the relic of that death (see Monk and Scholar at Nursling).

The Rise of the Cult

Boniface’s cult grew rapidly and widely. Within a few years of his death the Vita was commissioned and written, fixing his memory; his feast on 5 June was kept; and Fulda became a pilgrimage center and one of the foremost monasteries of the Frankish world (Levison 1946; Wood 2001; see The Life by Willibald). Under the patronage of the Carolingians and the great abbots who followed Sturm — Baugulf, Ratgar, and above all Rabanus Maurus (abbot 822–842, later archbishop of Mainz), one of the foremost scholars of the Carolingian renaissance — Fulda became a center of learning, art, and book-production of the first rank, its eminence inseparable from its standing as the shrine of Boniface (Levison 1946; Wood 2001). The monastery’s prestige carried the saint’s cult across Germany and beyond.

Over the centuries Boniface became a patron of the German lands and a symbol of German Christianity; in the modern period his shrine at Fulda became a focus of German Catholic identity, and the German bishops have long held their conferences at Fulda in his honor (Wood 2001; Palmer 2009). His relics remain at Fulda, in the cathedral built on the site of the monastery he founded, where they have been venerated continuously for over twelve and a half centuries. Among the saints of the German lands he holds a place comparable to that of Patrick in Ireland or Augustine in England: the apostle who gave a people the faith, remembered at the shrine that holds his bones.

Leoba Near the Apostle

A particular grace of the Fulda cult is its connection to Leoba. Boniface, before his last journey, had asked that the abbess Leoba — his kinswoman and the leader of the women of the mission — be buried beside him at Fulda when she died, that they might await the resurrection together (Rudolf of Fulda, Vita Leobae; trans. Talbot 1954; see Boniface and the Women of the Mission). The monks, the Vita Leobae reports, honored the wish in modified form, burying her near his tomb rather than within it; her relics too came to rest in the Fulda complex (Rudolf, Vita Leobae 21; Talbot 1954). The presence of the apostle and the abbess at the one shrine is a fitting memorial to a mission that was, distinctively, the work of holy men and holy women together (see Women in Orthodoxy).

The Shrine and the Faith

For the believer, Fulda and its relics are the visible seal of Boniface’s witness. The wilderness where Sturm sought a desert for monks became the resting place of a martyr and one of the great holy places of the West; the bones “more precious than gold” — to borrow the phrase the early Church used of the relics of Polycarp — were gathered and kept, and the faithful have come to them for more than a thousand years (cf. the early cult of relics; on which see the parallel in the Polycarp collection). The cult of Boniface at Fulda is a continuation of the ancient Christian veneration of the martyrs: the honoring of the bodies of those who gave their lives for Christ, and the keeping of their memory as a school of faith for those who come after (see The Orthodox Reception).

See Also

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 recovery of the body, the translation through Utrecht to Fulda, and the book of the martyrdom, at ch. 8.)
  • Eigil. The Life of Saint Sturm (Vita Sturmi). Trans. C. H. Talbot, in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954. (The burial at Fulda.)
  • Rudolf of Fulda. The Life of Saint Leoba (Vita Leobae). Trans. C. H. Talbot, in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954. (Leoba’s burial near Boniface, ch. 21.)
  • Levison, Wilhelm. England and the Continent in the Eighth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946. (The cult, the early Vita, Fulda under Rabanus Maurus.)
  • Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050. Harlow: Longman, 2001. (The relics, the Ragyndrudis Codex tradition, the cult, and Fulda’s eminence.)
  • Palmer, James T. Anglo-Saxons in a Frankish World, 690–900. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. (The development of the cult and of Fulda.)