Preface

doi:10.23943/princeton/9780691181660.002.0010

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Preface

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https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691181660.002.0010

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xxvii–xxx

Published:

February 2021

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In the early 970s, Pilgrim, the newly elected bishop of Passau in eastern Bavaria (971–91), began to survey the history of his see. The results were disheartening. Beyond a brace of privileges in the names of earlier monarchs, there was little to go on—certainly no indication of the exalted history Pilgrim had hoped to find. In his student days at Salzburg, he had read widely about the history of the region. It was probably there that he first encountered the Life of the fifth-century saint Severin (d. 482), detailing the experiences of the Mediterranean holy man during the turbulent decades which witnessed the eclipse of the Western Roman Empire; this work was also now available to Pilgrim at Passau. Wherever he may have come across it, Pilgrim’s attention was now drawn to a fleeting reference in the Life to a pontiff (pontifex) called Constantius, who had been based at Lorch (in modern Upper Austria) in Severin’s day. Lorch lay within Pilgrim’s diocese, and this account suggested that there had been a bishopric in the area as early as the fifth century, long before the foundation of Passau or Salzburg, Pilgrim’s neighbour and metropolitan to the south-west. That Lorch had indeed been an important early centre was borne out by physical remains of settlement there, including prominent antique walls and church buildings—remains Pilgrim knew at first hand. Perhaps most tantalizing of all, the Latin term used to designate this Constantius, pontifex, was an ambiguous one, equally applicable to a bishop or an archbishop (or even pope). In Pilgrim’s eyes, Constantius soon became not just a lowly bishop, but a metropolitan charged with authority over all Noricum (as the region was known)—the first on record.¹

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