History of Baden-Württemberg

In the year 1048, a Reichenau monk, whose job it was to record all important events of the monastery in a chronicle, wrote:
"The emperor came to our Reichenau and had the new church of the Holy Evangelist Mark (the Church of St.Mark, the west wing of the cathedral Reichenau, still stands today), our patron saint, that Abbot Berno had built, dedicated by Bishop Dietrich of Constance on the 24th of April." (from Arno Borst, Monks on Lake Constance, Jan Thorbeke Verlag, Sigmaringen, 1978, p. 112).
A very brief notice for such an important visit. He who came was up to then the most powerful man of the western world, one of the strongest ruling figures of the Middle Ages: Emperor Heinrich III (1039-1056). We have no picture of him: in those days one did not do portraits of people, even when they wore crowns. The emperor was, however, described: A giant with dark skin and black hair, and people called him "Black Heinrich." He was considered pious, but also strict; his enemies feared his harshness. He had already cast three unfit Popes from the throne of St. Peter and installed worthier successors in their place. As his predecessors, he took it to be the duty of an emperor to keep order within the Church as well.
So now he came to Reichenau. Too bad that the monk did not describe the event in more detail! We can illuminate a few details: Abbot Berno, who received the high guest, was already an old man and terminally ill. Certainly he could only with great effort take part in the festivities at the side of the emperor. But he was content and thanked God that he had granted him the grace to be able to experience this day. The emperor would have treated him with respect. Nine years before Berno had written him a long letter and exhorted him to protect the Church, to be just, and not to forget Reichenau. Such a man was the abbot of a great monastery that he could speak to the conscience of an emperor.

A few weeks after the visit of Heinrich III, Abbot Berno died. The chronicler wrote: "At this time the Lord Abbot Berno of Reichenau, a man of outstanding learning and morality, passed away in the fortieth year of his office, at a very old age, and because of sickness exhausted his days on the 7th of June. He rests buried in the Church of St. Mark." (ibid., p. 112)

No less interesting than the emperor and abbot is the chronicler, the monk, who recorded these events. His name: Hermann the Lame. One of his students, the monk Berthold, has described the unusual man:
"His limbs were so horribly stiffened in a way that he could not move away from where one placed him, not even turn to the other side. Even though he was also crippled in mouth, tongue and lips and could bring forth slowly only broken and difficult to understand words, he was for his students an eloquent and passionate teacher, lively and bright in speech, in contradiction extremely ready of wit, always ready to answer questions. This man always fearlessly believed that he had to take on all abilities, whether he was writing something new with his crooked fingers, or whether he had something written by others, or whether he was applying himself with full exertion to any useful or important job ... No one understood his talent of making clocks, build musical instruments, carry out mechanical tasks. With these and many other things, the recital of which would take too long, he kept himself continuously busy, insofar as his weak body allowed." (quoted from Felix Berner, Baden-Württembergische Portraits, Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart, 1985, pp. 27-28)

Contemporaries, the monks of Reichenau, princes, popes and emperor, marvelled at him. His fame has remained unextinguished to this day; because the so handicapped man has, as poet, as musician, as scholar, left an astonishing body of work behind. Songs that he composed are still sung. We can thank him for a world history that begins with Christ. In that, the events are much more reliably ordered than in older chronicles. He studied the movement of heavenly bodies; he wrote a textbook on geometry.

Only in a monastery was all this possible:

Only in a monastery could a scholar find what he needed for his studies: books, scientific writings, discourse with other scholars, a quiet atmosphere for work.

Only in a monastery could an almost totally handicapped person lead the life of a scholar. He needed the helping hands of the other monks and his students. He could not even take a book off a shelf. But they always helped him so willingly, that it seemed that his fate never bothered him, that he remained a cheerful person. In the monastery, the one helped the other; that was part of the rule that St. Benedict had given to the monks a half a millenium before.

The Reichenau monks came from noble families, and so on the outside, they would be great lords. Is it not astonishing that they voluntarily went into a monastery where they would be required to serve? They were obliged to poverty and chastity, and they always had to obey the abbot.
Evidently the discipline of the cloister was not burdensome for them, rather, it was beneficial. In spite of all strictness, it was a very human order. That we gather when we read about Hermann the Lame.
We also understand that the medieval monasteries were the only places for scholarship and art. In Hermann's time, in the 11th century, hardly anyone other than monks could read and write.

We now have an array of manuscripts that were produced in Reichenau: worth millions. Paintings decorated the text. But even the letters were painted with such love and care that we view them with pleasure. The Reichenau monks were famous for their artistic initial letters.

Even Hermann the Lame came from a noble family. We was born in the year 1013 as the son of the Swabian Count Wolfrat of Altshausen (between Saulgau and Weingarten). His mother, Hiltrud, took especially loving care of the delicate child. It was of course recognized that Hermann would never be capable of leading the life of a knight, but it also did not remain concealed that he possessed an extraordinary understanding. Thus his parents brought him when just seven years old to Reichenau. He never left the island again to the end of his life. He became a monk at about age 30. When he died in 1054 at the age of 41, he was taken to the house of his father and buried in the family vault.