Adalbert of Prague

Life and Ministry

Vojtěch was born around AD 956 to the Slavnik dynasty of Bohemia, one of the two great noble houses of the recently Christianized Czech lands, and was educated at the cathedral school of Magdeburg under the archbishop of the same name — Adalbert — whose name he took at confirmation. Returning to Bohemia, he was elected the second bishop of Prague in 982 at twenty-six and consecrated by the emperor Otto II. His attempt to reform a still half-pagan Czech aristocracy made him enemies; twice he abandoned the see in despair and went to Rome, where he was a friend of the emperors Otto III and Henry II and a guest at the great Benedictine houses of Italy. By 997 his entire Slavnik family had been massacred in a political purge by the rival Premyslid dynasty. He turned, in his early forties, to mission work among the Baltic pagans.

Circumstances of Death

Adalbert and two companions — his half-brother Radim and a presbyter named Bogusza — sailed from Gdańsk on the Polish coast in early 997 toward Prussian territory at the mouth of the Vistula. They preached for three days in a sacred grove near the modern Truso. The Prussians, regarding the Christian preaching as a violation of their sacred precinct, surrounded them on the morning of April 23. The earliest source — the Vita Prima of Adalbert by John Canaparius, written within four years of the death — describes him standing among the heathens with his arms outstretched in the posture of orans prayer when a priest of the local cult drove a spear through his chest. He was beheaded after he fell, his body thrown into the marsh, and his head impaled on a stake.

Legacy

Boleslaw I of Poland purchased Adalbert's body back from the Prussians for its weight in gold and enshrined it at Gniezno, which became the metropolitan see of the new Polish church. Otto III made a personal pilgrimage to the shrine in 1000. Adalbert is one of the patron saints of Poland (Wojciech in Polish), the Czech Republic (Vojtěch in Czech), and Hungary (where he had baptized King Stephen). The bronze doors of Gniezno Cathedral, cast in the late twelfth century, depict eighteen scenes from his life and remain one of the great works of Romanesque sculpture in Europe.