Ansgar of Hamburg

Life and Ministry

Ansgar was a Frankish Benedictine monk of Corbie, sent in AD 826 as a missionary to the kingdom of Denmark with the converted king Harald Klak, then in AD 829 across the Baltic to Birka in Sweden as the first sustained Christian mission to the Norse. He founded congregations, ordained native clergy, established a presbyterate at Birka, and on his return to Frankish territory was consecrated as the first archbishop of the newly-created see of Hamburg in AD 831, with a papal commission to the legation of the Northern peoples. When Hamburg was destroyed by a Viking raid in AD 845, he reorganized the mission from the combined sees of Hamburg-Bremen and continued his pastoral journeys until his death.

Circumstances of Death

Ansgar was not killed for the faith — he died at Bremen of natural causes on 3 February AD 865, at the end of nearly forty years of mission to the Norse. His biographer Rimbert, who succeeded him as archbishop, records his final illness and his last words on his deathbed: a wish, often quoted, that God would account him worthy not only of the work but of suffering, and a renewed prayer for the conversion of the Northern peoples. He is included among the witnesses-to-blood (martyrs in the wider patristic sense) because of the unique violence and risk of his pastoral journeys — repeated Viking raids, the destruction of his cathedral, the constant threat of slave-taking on the Baltic — and because his work prepared the death-witness of many later Scandinavian Christians, beginning with the missionary saints whose blood was shed at Birka after his repose.

Legacy

Ansgar is the apostle of Scandinavia, and his Vita Anskarii by Rimbert is one of the most historically valuable missionary documents of the early Middle Ages. The Scandinavian peoples did not become Christian within his lifetime, and he died not seeing the conversion he had prayed for, but every later Norse Christian — from Olaf Tryggvason to the modern Lutheran north — stood on the foundation he laid. His witness is that the missionary measures success not by sight but by faithfulness; that the seed-sower's reward is sometimes only the next sower's harvest; and that the long obedience of forty years in a hostile country is, in its way, as costly as any quick death.