(TMR 99.05.16)

Tuomas Heikkila.  <i>Das Kloster Fulda und der Goslarer
Rangstreit</i>.  Series: Suomalaisen Tiedeakatemian toimituksia.
Sarja humaniora, nide-tom. 298.  Helsinki: Annales Academiae
Scientiarum Fennicae, 1998.  Pp. 222, 1 map, 7 ill.  ISBN
9-514-10856-6.

   Reviewed by Albrecht Classen
University of Arizona
ACLASSEN@u.arizona.edu

In medieval Germany the various archbishops, bishops, and
imperial abbots waged a closely watched battle over who ranked
highest and exerted the most influence.  This ranking was often
expressed in public, for instance, through seating arrangements
during mass or at other official occasions.  Such an event took
place at Pentecost of 1063 in Goslar, but the competition between
the imperial Abbot of Fulda, Widerad, and the Bishop of
Hildesheim, Hezilo, suddenly erupted into a physical conflict as
the latter called his soldiers, hidden in the church, to come
forward and had the Fulda group forced out of the church.  They
in turn soon called their own soldiers which then led to a
bloodbath.  Hezilo was later able to put all the blame on Widerad
who, already weakened through other political circumstances,
resorted to bribery of the involved royals, bishops, and
archbishops not to investigate the affair and sweep it under the
carpet.  This massive bribery in turn depleted the wealth of the
Fulda monastery, and soon a group of Fulda monks staged a riot
against Widerad which, however, was soon crushed.

These events, as minuscule as they might seem to the modern
historian, provide the basis for Tuomas Heikkila's (the name is
actually spelled with an umlaut over the 'a') detailed
examination in which he draws significant conclusions from the
small conflict in Goslar which shed significant light on the
political, economic, and religious role of the Fulda monastery at
large, and hence also on the political situation of
eleventh-century Germany.  Since its foundation in the eighth
century Fulda had always enjoyed a tremendous political influence
and boasted one of the largest land holdings in Germany. 
Therefore, the abbots of Fulda had always claimed second position
right after the Archbishop of Mainz, even though this claim was
challenged from time to time.  Because Fulda had been founded by
the missionary St. Boniface, and because Fulda had always enjoyed
a very good relationship with the papacy, the monastery could
indeed argue for its political supremacy within the German
empire.  The Abbot of Fulda was also the archimandrite or
archabbot, meaning that he was the primas of all abbots in
Germany.  This privilege entitled him to wear during mass the
symbolic dalmatic and sandals as if he held the rank of a
cardinal.  Moreover, the monastery of Fulda had received as a
gift from the pope the monastery St. Andrea in Rome, probably to
serve as the private quarters for those abbots who went to Rome
to receive the pope's consecration.  Heikkila also points out
that the Fulda abbot and the Mainz archbishop enjoyed a
particularly close relationship, even though this did not
necessarily imply that Fulda could indeed assume the second
position right after the archbishop.

Bishop Hezilo of Hildesheim was not only eager to reject
Widerad's claim for his personal sake, but also to use the
occasion to demonstrate his political power and to humiliate
Fulda which owned many estates within his bishopric. Much more
important, though, proved to be the relationship between Hezilo
and the Archbishop of Cologne, Anno, who had, so to speak,
kidnapped the young ruler Henry IV from his mother Agnes in 1062
and had assumed a representative governorship over Germany in his
new role as Henry's tutor.  The Archbishop of Mainz, Siegfried,
struggled against Anno and tried to outmaneuver him in the
control over the young German emperor and to defeat him in their
political competition.  At Christmas of 1062 Siegfried had
convened a synod in Goslar to rally support for his position, and
at that time Abbot Widerad had indeed managed to secure the
second rank behind the archbishop of Mainz.  As Heikkila
emphasizes, however, Siegfried only thought of his own
self-aggrandizement, not of Fulda's plight because a few years
later Mainz forced the abbey to turn over considerable taxation
privileges and so weakened Fulda financially.

In fact, it seems as if Widerad became a pawn in Siegfried's
machinations and quickly lost in his struggle against Hezilo
because the bloody outcome of the fight in Goslar was entirely
blamed on him and his people because Widerad had called in his
armed troops after the first onslaught by the Hildesheim soldiers
which dramatically escalated the conflict.  Consequently, the
Fulda abbot had to pay large sums of money to his opponents to
avoid being removed from his position.  The riot against him
which resulted as a consequence, however, was immediately met by
general opposition and was quickly squashed because it would have
endangered the rigid hierarchical thinking typical of that time
(173).

Another important consequence of the event in Goslar was that
Archbishop Anno of Cologne, weakened by the steady confrontation
with Archbishop Siegfried of Mainz, had to find a new ally in
Archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg-Bremen.  The latter forced Anno in
1063 to share the governorship with him which Heikkila describes
as the result of a long-term effort on Adalbert's part to rob
Anno of some of his political power.  The battle in Goslar did
not necessarily trigger the division of the governorship, but it
certainly demonstrated publicly that Anno was not strong enough
to avoid such scandals.  Siegfried also lost in influence, and
Widerad barely managed to survive the crisis.  The Fulda
monastery received a devastating blow in Goslar and from then on
experienced a steady economic and political decline, even though,
as the author emphasizes, the cultural-literary life continued
quite rigorously.

Heikkila's study, which seems to have been his doctoral
dissertation submitted at the University of Helsinki, proves to
be an excellent case study in which both the local and the global
events are sharply profiled and discussed in very clear terms. 
The author considers not only the most recent research
literature, but has also returned to scholarship dating back to
the seventeenth century because it contains much valuable
information about sources which are lost today and which often
appear to have had a better understanding of the historical
events than modern historians.

Heikkila introduces us once again to the historical development
of the Fulda monastery and places the Goslar conflict in the
context of imperial politics (Henry III and his young son, Henry
IV).  Moreover, he also illustrates the economic, religious, and
ideological aspects dominant in the eleventh century.  In other
words, although Heikkila seems to look only into a small, locally
interesting case, the fight in Goslar 1063, he unearths the wider
implications and demonstrates the lasting significance resulting
from this bloody clash between the Abbot of Fulda and the Bishop
of Hildesheim.

The reader would have profited from a different structure than
the present one, as the actual historical events, the fight in
Goslar, are detailed only very late in the fourth chapter, after
Heikkila has discussed the various sources available today, the
history of the monastery Fulda, the individual characters
involved in the struggle both within the church and in the
government, and the reasons for the fight to erupt in the first
place.  Nevertheless, the study is well written and masterfully
takes us through the maze of charges and countercharges.  It also
needs to be pointed out that Heikkila, although a Fin, has
written his thesis in an almost impeccable German.  This book
proves to be a solid and critical investigation of a complex case
and convincingly argues for the imperial significance of the
small event in Goslar in 1063.