Saint Adalgar

Adalgar (died 9 May 909), venerated as Saint Adalgar, was the third archbishop of Bremen from 888 until his death. Adalgar is revered as a saint in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. His feast day is 29 April. When Rimbert was appointed in 865 to succeed Ansgar, the first archbishop of Hamburg, the abbot of the Benedictine abbey of Corvey gave him his brother, Adalgar, as a companion. The young Adalgar was then a deacon. Toward the end of Rimbert's life, he was consecrated bishop to assist the latter; and he succeeded him in the archbishopric on 11 June 888. During the latter half of his twenty years’ rule, age and infirmity made it necessary for him also to have a coadjutor in the person of Hoger, another monk of Corvey; and later five neighboring bishops were charged to assist the archbishop in his metropolitan duties. Adalgar lived in troublous times. Although Arnulf's victory over the Normans (891) was a relief to his diocese, and although under Louis the Child (900-911) it suffered less from Hungarian onslaughts than the districts to the south and east of it, yet the general confusion restricted Adalgar's activity, and he was able to do very little in the northern kingdoms which were supposed to be part of his mission. There were also new contests over the relation of Bremen to the archiepiscopal see of Cologne. Bremen had originally been under the jurisdiction of Cologne; but this relation was dissolved on the reestablishment of the archbishopric of Hamburg in 848; and Pope Nicholas I had confirmed the subordination of Bremen to Hamburg in 864. In 890 Archbishop Hermann of Cologne wrote to Pope Stephen V, demanding that the archbishop of Hamburg, as bishop of Bremen be subject to him.