Anselm (died 805) was the
Lombard Duke of Friuli
The dukes and margraves of Friuli were the rulers of the Duchy and March of Friuli in the Middle Ages.
The dates given below, when contentious, are discussed in the articles of the respective dukes.
Lombard dukes
* 568–c.584 Grasulf I
...
in the northeastern part of
Lombard Italy,
He left the world at the height of his secular career, and in 750 built a monastery at
Fanano, a place given to him by
Aistulf,
King of the Lombards, who had married Anselm's sister Gisaltruda. Two years later he built the
monastery of Nonantula, a short distance northeast of
Modena
Modena (, , ; egl, label=Emilian language#Dialects, Modenese, Mòdna ; ett, Mutna; la, Mutina) is a city and ''comune'' (municipality) on the south side of the Po Valley, in the Province of Modena in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern I ...
, which Aistulf endowed. Anselm went to Rome, where
Pope Stephen III invested him with the
habit of Saint Benedict, gave him some relics of
Saint Sylvester and appointed him Abbot of Nonantula. Anselm founded many hospices where the poor and the sick were sheltered and cared for by monks.
According to the twelfth-century ''Catalogus abbatum nonantulorum'', a list of abbots of Nonantola with their histories,
Desiderius, who succeeded Aistulf as King of the Lombards in 756, banished Anselm from Nonantula in favor of his own protégé. Anselm spent the seven years of his exile at the Benedictine monastery of
Monte Cassino, but returned to Nonantula after Desiderius was taken prisoner by
Charlemagne
Charlemagne ( , ) or Charles the Great ( la, Carolus Magnus; german: Karl der Große; 2 April 747 – 28 January 814), a member of the Carolingian dynasty, was King of the Franks from 768, King of the Lombards from 774, and the first Em ...
in the
war of 774. This exile is not mentioned the earlier ''Vita Anselmi'', a biography of Anselm written one or two hundred years after his death.
[Nicholas Everett, ''Literacy and Lombard Italy, c. 568–774'' (Cambridge: 2003), 294 n. 70.] Until 1083, Nonantula was an imperial monastery, and after Anselm's time its discipline often suffered from imperial interference in the election of its abbots.
Having been abbot for fifty years, Anselm died at Nonantula in 805, where the commune still honors him as
patron
Patronage is the support, encouragement, privilege, or financial aid that an organization or individual bestows on another. In the history of art, arts patronage refers to the support that kings, popes, and the wealthy have provided to artists su ...
. His
feast day is 3 March.
References
Sources
*
Paul the Deacon''Historia Langobardorum''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Anselm, Duke Of Friuli
Dukes of Friuli
Italian abbots
8th-century Christian saints
Burials at Nonantola Abbey
8th-century births
805 deaths
Medieval Italian saints
Italian Benedictines
Benedictine abbots
Benedictine saints
8th-century Lombard people
Italian Christian monks