Saint Gottschalk
Patron saint of lost vocations
Join me today as we meet a saint who gave up everything to avenge his father, only to discover that he had lost his vocation.
Name: Gottschalk
Life: c. 1000 - 1066 AD
Status: Saint
Feast: June 7
By 1147 AD the political order that Gottschalk had worked to build was broken beyond repair. In the Wendish Crusade of 1147, the armies of Scandinavia and the Holy Roman Empire moved to follow the instructions of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux: convert the Wends or destroy them. They did both.
Saxon armies attacked from the West and Scandinavians came down from the North. The Wends would be forcibly baptized. The idols of their gods would be cast down.
And through the decades that followed, the hopes for an independent land of the Wends would come to an end. Eventually, few would remember that there ever were Wends, tall, ash-blonde, blue-eyed Slavs who lived in the borderlands between the Holy Roman Empire (present day Germany) and Poland. As time passed, it would be all but forgotten that the black bull in the coat of arms of House Mecklenburg was once the black bull of the Obotrites, the Northern Wends who lived along the coast of the Baltic Sea.
As he watched the story play out, Helmold the Saxon, priest of Bosau, was filled with sadness. He could see so clearly that history could have gone in a different direction. And if history had gone that way, the hinge on which it would have turned was today’s manly saint, Gottschalk.
Gottschalk’s father was a prince of the Obotrites, a dominant tribe among the Wends. The Obotrites lived in the North of contemporary Germany, near the Elbe river, on the coast of the Baltic Sea. This meant they traded with the Scandinavians. And in this era of Vikings, there was raiding too, sometimes with the Wends getting raided, sometimes doing the raiding. To the West were the Saxons and the growing might of Hamburg, part of the coalition of Germans who made up the Holy Roman Empire. The Wends were slowly being Christianized, but many of them remained pagan. The further you got from the Baltic Sea, the less contact Wends had with the outside world and the more pagan they were.
Gottschalk’s family encapsulates the story of Wends and Christianity up to that point. Gottschalk’s grandfather had been a Christian but had returned to paganism. Gottschalk’s father, Udo, was a Christian, but the chronicler Adam of Bremen goes out of his way to tell us he was a bad Christian, whatever that means exactly. At any rate, Udo was enough of a Christian to send his son Gottschalk away to the monastery of Saint Michael at Lüneburg to be educated.
And so Gottschalk was at school when his father was murdered.
We don’t know much about the murder. The murderer was a Saxon and a deserter. Adam of Bremen says that the issue was partially that Udo was a bad Christian, but also that he was a cruel lord. In other words, it was a complex situation. Gottschalk knew he should do something. His father had been murdered, and it was up to him to respond.
The theme of a son avenging his father runs through many Northern tales. Of course the most famous of these is the story of Amleth, retold by Shakespeare as Hamlet. While Gottschalk’s father was killed by a stranger, Amleth’s father is killed by his own brother. But what Gottschalk and Amleth have in common is their relative helplessness. Amleth is helpless because the man who killed his father also deprives Amleth of the opportunity for vengeance. Gottschalk was helpless because he was a young man away at school, out of the loop.
There was another issue as well. Gottschalk was a Christian. The Church had been working for centuries in the North to end the culture of blood feuds, to promote justice instead of vengeance. That was a hard lesson for the men of the North - as it would be for any man. Christians knew that they shouldn’t seek vengeance, even though they wanted to do it. We see the tension emerge in wish-fulfillment fantasies like the one in the contemporary Saga of Burnt Njal, where a blind man named Amund confronts his father’s killer. Suddenly, a wonder happens: Amund’s sight returns. “Praised be the Lord! now I see what His will is,” shouts Amund, and he grabs an axe and buries it in the murderer’s head before going blind again.
In real life, Gottschalk wasn’t going to get this kind of invitation. And in real life, vengeance is rarely as satisfying as it is tempting. Shakespeare’s play has Hamlet die at the moment of vengeance, so that the question of whether his vengeance was worthwhile is left to the audience.
(By the way, in the original saga, Amleth goes on to consolidate power, marry, conquer lands in Scotland, take a second wife whom he likes better than the first one, pick an unwinnable fight and finally, after he is dead, get betrayed by his second wife who cheerfully marries the victor. The moral of his tale, according to Saxo Grammaticus, has nothing to do with vengeance. It’s that you can’t trust women.)
Like Amleth, Gottschalk chose the path of vengeance. It’s possible that he thought he’d be unlikely to get justice from Duke Bernard of the Saxons, since the killer had been a Saxon after all. But we know that Gottschalk didn’t even try. Instead he left his studies and his faith, raised the black bull banner of his people, and rode South.
Among the Southern Wends, Gottschalk soon formed a warband. Helmold the Saxon calls them “a multitude of robbers”, so these may have been disaffected youth rather than a political faction. Gottschalk led his robbers North, and ravaged the lands around Hamburg, although he found that he wasn’t able to capture the major forts - siege technology had largely been forgotten after the fall of Rome. “Such slaughter did he perpetrate on the Christian people that his cruelty exceeded all measure,” says Helmold. (Francis Joseph Tschan translation).
Unlike Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Gottschalk lived long enough to contemplate the result of his vengeance. He didn’t like what he saw. One day, Helmold tells us, it hit him as he was riding through his homeland and realizing that it was empty.
when [Gottschalk] saw what had at one time been a country teeming with men and churches reduced to a waste solitude, he shuddered at the work of his own savagery and “it grieved him at his heart.”
Helmold has a habit of quoting the Bible and framing prophecies as descriptions of the doings of the medieval North, and here his quotation is from Genesis 6:6, the moment when God looks at the world and is so grieved by the state of things that He decides to send the flood to wash it all clean. I think that what Helmold is trying to tell us about Gottschalk is that he was beginning to recognize that in his quest for vengeance he had been focused on his responsibilities as a son and forgotten about his responsibilities as a prince. His vengeance was successful in the sense that thousands of Saxons were dead. It was unsuccessful in that he had turned his homelands into a burned ruin. Gottschalk was facing the terrible disconnect that always seems to exist between human vengeance and actual justice. Perhaps this is when Gottschalk began to worry that he was not where God wanted him to be, that he had lost his vocation.
Gottschalk was so disgusted by what he had done that he decided to surrender to Duke Bernard. At first, the locals were so scared of him that he couldn’t find anyone to surrender to. And then it was out of his hands anyway, as he was captured by the Duke - although it’s hard to imagine Gottschalk made much effort to get away. He was brought before Duke Bernard in chains, fully expecting to die.
But Duke Bernard saw something in the young rebel. The Duke ordered Gottschalk to be freed. Instead of treating him as an enemy, he treated the young man as a warrior, giving him gifts: weapons, a cloak, armour. And then Bernard sent the surprised young man North. He had arranged for him to be a companion of the great King Knut.
Knut was already a legend in his own lifetime. He was the ultimate Viking. He had raided England and then conquered it, crushing the Saxon Edmund Ironsides. Soon after, Knut had become king of Denmark as well.
Knut was a tough warrior and an uncompromising king. The anonymous Saxon monk who wrote the Encomium of Emma the Queen notes with satisfaction how Knut dealt with the sleazy Saxon oathbreaker, lord Eadric. Eadric had betrayed Edmund at the worst possible moment, then smugly gone to Knut expecting a reward. Knut turned to one of his men, his face like stone.
“Pay this man what we owe him.” (Alistair Campbell translation)
The other warrior drew his axe and took off the traitor Eadric’s head with a single swing.
Knut was not afraid of violence or of dispensing justice. But, the monk who wrote the Encomium adds, Knut was a Christian monarch.
He supported orphans and strangers, he suppressed unjust laws and those who applied them, he exalted and cherished justice and equity, he built and dignified churches
There’s a nice story about Knut told by the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon. It takes place after Knut has conquered England and Denmark, when he’s recognized everywhere as a great king, and surrounded by flatterers telling him how he is lord of land and sea all around him. So Knut orders all his flattering courtiers to follow him out to the seashore. As the tide comes in, Knut commands it to go back - after all, isn’t he king of all these lands and waters? Of course the tide rolls in and soaks him. By now the courtiers are worried that his mind is going, so Knut turns and explains the lesson. He doesn’t own the land and the sea. No mortal does, and in a way no mortal is truly worthy of being called a king. But Knut knows who is, and who would be a suitable object for the praise his courtiers keep lavishing on him. To show them what he means, Knut takes off his golden crown and hangs it on a crucifix. He leaves it there as a reminder, and never wears a crown again.
I like to think it was Knut who made the difference in Gottschalk’s life. Gottschalk had believed that he had to choose between being a Christian and being a real man. But in Knut, I suspect, he found someone who was both. This recognition that you can be both manly and Christian may have saved Gottschalk’s soul. It’s something every young man needs to learn - of course that is the point of this Manly Saints Project.
When Knut died, Gottschalk remained with one of Knut’s relatives, Sven Estridson, until 1043. At that time, a campaign by the King of Norway had killed off the senior members of the Wendish aristocracy. The moment seemed right for Gottschalk to go home.
The Gottschalk who returned was very different from the one who had left. Gottschalk wanted peace with the Scandinavians and the Saxons, and now he was willing to work with them. The Gottschalk who returned was also a committed Christian. Gottschalk founded churches and monasteries. He wasn’t just open to Christianity, he was active in promoting it, serving as a cultural go-between to help translate Christian concepts into a language his people could easily understand. An Irish bishop by the name of John became Gottschalk’s personal friend, and they set about evangelizing the land together. Through his efforts, says Helmold, “a countless multitude of pagans thronged to receive the grace of baptism.”
Gottschalk realized that if the Wends were to survive as an independent people, they would have to be Christianized and properly join the Holy Roman Empire. For that reason, he helped the Saxons and the Scandinavians to pacify and Christianize the Wends in the South. Gottschalk’s early campaigns had taught him the value of fortifications, so he tore down those that worked against his plan for integration, and put up forts in strategic locations.
It clearly bothered Helmold the Saxon to admit it, but in his time, Gottschalk was the only one who really cared about bringing the Word of God to the Wends. You can hear a note of hurt Saxon pride in his tone:
Therefore, let commendation and unbounded praise be heaped upon the most worthy Gottschalk, who, sprung from the barbarian peoples, restored to his race the gift of faith, the grace of belief through the abounding fervor of his love. Let the Saxon chiefs be censured, who, sprung from Christian forefathers and reared in the bosom of Holy Mother Church, are found ever sterile and empty in the work of God.
For a moment in history, it looked as though the story of the Wends might be one of peaceful integration in the Holy Roman Empire. Gottschalk’s evangelization was working. “If a longer life had been granted him,” Helmold writes, “he would have disposed all the pagans to embrace Christianity”.
But then, over the course of a few years, key allies of Gottschalk’s died. Duke Bernard died, as did the Archbishop of Hamburg. And in the instability of the moment, a revolution arose among the Southern Wends. When they rebelled, Gottschalk was killed and his wife and sons fled. Gottschalk’s friend Bishop John would be killed, and his head offered to the Wendish god Radogost. Retribution came swiftly, and the cycle of raid for raid returned. One of Gottschalk’s sons would die fighting the rebels, and the other would eventually regain his father’s place, for a while, although he would never have his Christian zeal or grand vision. In time, the Wends would be folded into the Holy Roman Empire and forgotten.
If Gottschalk is the patron saint of lost vocations, we have to ask whether he lost his vocation. In a way, the answer is yes, he obviously did. Gottschalk rejected Christianity entirely, and early on he rejected a path to justice that could have made him a much better prince. But in another way, to ask the question of whether he lost his vocation is to forget that it is in God, as Saint Paul says, that “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Gottschalk’s road to sainthood led through rebellion, captivity and war across the North. It was a path so complex and circuitous that for a very long time, he did not realize that his final destination was the One who had been calling him from the beginning.
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