The Destruction of the Church: On Bishops, Slavs and Ambitions in Thietmar´s Chronicle

Abstract

In the context of the strategies applied by the imperial Church to deepen Christianization in Central Europe, the establishment of a network of bishoprics, the care and enlargement of the church and its possessions is a bishop's essential task. However, the bishopric of Merseburg, created in 968 as a suffragan of the missionary archbishopric of Magdeburg, suffered from the actions of Bishop Giselher (971-981), who, according to the chronicler and later bishop Thietmar of Merseburg, disregarded his duties out of ambition for power: he desired the archiepiscopal seat, which was vacant after Adalbert´s death. Giselher´s personality and acts were construed in Thietmar´s Chronicle as mainly negative and deriving from intense greed. In his references to Giselher, not only the adjectives he uses, but also the narrative structure shows a correlation between the resulting destruction of the diocese and the absence of peace in the region following the acts of a person who strove ever upwards, on the one hand, and the attacks of the Slavs (greedy dogs) during the uprising in 983, on the other. The consequences of ambitious impulses and the customs of the Slavs are compared. This chapter deals with these topics and states that Thietmar's criticism is based in his role as an Amtsbischof and not on bare Christian values.