Into Italy and the Lombards

Crossing the Alps about 612–613, Columbanus came into the kingdom of the Lombards, where King Agilulf and his Catholic queen Theodelinda received him with honour and granted him a ruined church and land at Bobbio, in a valley of the northern Apennines south of Pavia. There, in 614, the aged abbot founded his last monastery, the house that would bear his name and become one of the great centres of learning in the medieval West. He died at Bobbio on 23 November 615. This file covers the Lombard welcome, the foundation, and his death.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; missionary to the Continent)

The Lombard Kingdom

The Italy Columbanus entered was ruled by the Lombards, a Germanic people who had invaded the peninsula in 568 and established a kingdom centred on Pavia, alongside the Byzantine-held lands of the exarchate and the territories of Rome. The Lombard ruling house was religiously divided: King Agilulf and many of his people were Arian in their Christianity, while his influential Catholic queen, Theodelinda, was a patron of the Catholic Church and in correspondence with Pope Gregory the Great (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.30; O’Hara and Wood 2017; Wood 2001). Northern Italy was further divided by the Three Chapters schism, which had set much of its Catholic episcopate against Rome (see The Three Chapters and Arianism). Into this tangled landscape came the old Irish abbot, and the Lombard court, perhaps seeing in so distinguished a churchman a useful ally, received him warmly (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.30; O’Hara and Wood 2017).

The Grant of Bobbio

Agilulf, Jonas says, welcomed Columbanus and offered him a place to settle where he wished within the kingdom, and Columbanus was directed to — or chose — a remote and ruined spot in the Apennines: Bobbio (Latin Bobium), in the valley of the Trebbia, where stood a half-ruined church of St. Peter (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.30; O’Hara and Wood 2017). There, in 614, he restored the church and founded his monastery, gathering his monks and re-establishing the Columban discipline in this new Italian house (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.30; O’Hara and Wood 2017; Wood 2001). Jonas recounts the now-customary wonders of a foundation — the providential carrying of timber, the taming of the difficult site — reported here as his testimony (METHODOLOGY §3.5). Bobbio was the last and, for the long history of European learning, perhaps the most consequential of all Columbanus’s foundations: it would become a great library and scriptorium, a treasury of ancient manuscripts, and the guardian of his cult and relics (see Bobbio and the Cult).

The placing of Bobbio was strategically as well as spiritually apt. It lay on routes between the Lombard capital and the coast and near the frontier of the Arian and Three-Chapters world, well positioned for a monastery meant to be a centre of orthodox Catholic life in a religiously contested region (Wood 2001; O’Hara, ed., 2018). Whether Columbanus chose it for that reason or simply for its solitude, the location gave Bobbio a significance beyond the merely monastic from the start.

A Foundation Charter and Royal Protection

Bobbio differs from the Gallic foundations in one historically valuable respect: its origin is documented not only by Jonas but, in part, by charter evidence. A diploma of King Agilulf granting the site and its lands to Columbanus is preserved in the later Bobbio tradition, and although the authenticity and exact wording of the earliest such documents have been debated, the substance — a royal grant placing the new monastery under the king’s protection and endowing it with land — is consistent with the Vita and with the way Lombard kings patronized religious houses (Wood 2001; O’Hara, ed., 2018) [Disputed: the text of Agilulf's grant to Bobbio survives only in later copies and reworked forms, and diplomatists have questioned how much of the wording is original; the fact of a royal grant and protection, however, is not in serious doubt and squares with Jonas's account (Wood 2001; O'Hara, ed., 2018)]. The royal protection mattered: it gave Bobbio, from its first year, a measure of the independence from local episcopal control that Columbanus had fought for and failed to secure in Gaul — and Bobbio would later obtain papal privileges confirming its liberty, becoming a model of the exempt monastery (Wood 2001; O’Hara 2018). The independence that had made him a thorn to the Frankish bishops was, in Italy, secured by Lombard favour from the outset (see Rome and the Celtic Churches).

The choice of a dedication to St. Peter for the restored church is itself suggestive. For a founder so devoted to the apostolic see — who called Rome great only through Peter’s chair (see The Three Chapters and Arianism) — the placing of his last and greatest house under Peter’s patronage, in the contested religious landscape of northern Italy, reads as a deliberate statement of catholic and Petrine loyalty in a region torn by schism and Arianism (O’Hara, ed., 2018).

The Last Months and Death

Columbanus did not live long at Bobbio. He had founded it as a man near seventy, and in his final months, even as he laboured over the new house, he was drawn into the Three Chapters controversy and wrote his last great letter to Pope Boniface IV (see The Three Chapters and Arianism). Jonas reports that, sensing his end near, he withdrew to a cave in the mountainside that he had used as an oratory, and that he made provision for the governance of his houses — sending, in a gesture of reconciliation, his pastoral staff to Gall as a token of forgiveness, in the tradition associated with their parting (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.30; O’Hara and Wood 2017). He died at Bobbio on 23 November 615, the date on which his feast is kept (Jonas, Vita Columbani I.30; O’Hara and Wood 2017; on the feast and cult, see Bobbio and the Cult). His body was buried in the monastery he had founded, where his relics remain to this day (see Bobbio and the Cult).

The death at Bobbio set the seal on a life that had carried an Irish monk from Leinster to Ulster, across Gaul, up the Rhine, and over the Alps to die in the Italian Apennines — a span across the whole of Latin Christendom that no other figure of the age could match, and the geographical fact on which the later “patron of Europe” framing would rest (see Legacy and Assessment).

See Also

References

  • Jonas of Bobbio. Life of Columbanus. Trans. Alexander O’Hara and Ian Wood. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017. (Book I, chapter 30: the Lombard welcome, Agilulf and Theodelinda, the grant and foundation of Bobbio in 614, the last months, the staff sent to Gall, and the death on 23 November 615.)
  • Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life. Harlow: Longman, 2001. (The Lombard kingdom, Agilulf’s Arianism, Theodelinda, and the strategic placing of Bobbio.)
  • O’Hara, Alexander, ed. Columbanus and the Peoples of Post-Roman Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. (Bobbio’s foundation and its later significance.)