Saint Bruno of Querfurt

Saint Bruno of Querfurt, also known by his monastic name Boniface, was a Saxon monk, missionary bishop, and martyr. He preached the Gospel in Hungary and among the Pechenegs, was a friend of Bolesław the Brave, and wrote the story of the Five Martyr Brothers. He was killed in 1009. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on March 9, while in Poland his memorial falls on July 12.

He was born about 974 at Querfurt in Saxony, into a noble family; the exact date is not known. He was educated at the cathedral school in Magdeburg and became a canon there, and later a chaplain to Emperor Otto III, whom he accompanied on his journey to Italy.

In Rome, moved by the martyrdom of Saint Adalbert, he entered in 998 the Benedictine monastery on the Aventine, where Adalbert himself had earlier been a monk. He took the name Boniface. About 1001 he joined the disciples of Saint Romuald in the hermitage of Pereum near Ravenna. From there his friend Benedict set out with John on the mission to Poland that Bolesław the Brave had asked for. Bruno was to join them.

Pope Sylvester II gave him the pallium of a missionary archbishop, without a see of his own, and in 1004 he was consecrated bishop by Tagino, the archbishop of Magdeburg. But the war between the German king Henry II and Bolesław closed his way to Poland. So he went to Hungary, and then to Rus’. Vladimir, the prince of Kyiv, tried to dissuade him from going to the Pechenegs, nomads from the lands along the Dnieper, yet Bruno spent five months among them, baptized about thirty people, and brought about peace between them and Rus’.

After this expedition he came to Poland, to Bolesław the Brave. He wrote the Life of the Five Brothers, the story of Benedict and his companions, who were killed in 1003, and he is also the author of a Life of Saint Adalbert. At the turn of 1008 and 1009 he wrote a letter to King Henry II. He reproached him for his alliance with pagans against a Christian ruler, and of Bolesław he wrote that he loved him as his own soul and more than his own life.

Soon afterward he set out with eighteen companions on a mission to the Prussians. All of them were killed by pagans in the borderland of Prussia, Rus’, and Lithuania, probably in the land of the Yotvingians; Bruno was beheaded. As the day of his death the sources most often give March 9, 1009, but also February 14. The Annals of Quedlinburg, in describing this event, are the first source in history to mention the name of Lithuania. According to the chronicler Thietmar, Bolesław the Brave ransomed the bodies of the martyrs, but it is not known where they were buried.

There was no formal canonization: Bruno was venerated as a martyr soon after his death. Since 1963 he has been the principal patron of the Diocese of Łomża. On the millennium of his death, in 2009, Benedict XVI sent his legate to the celebrations in Łomża and Giżycko. He wrote then that Bruno, an illustrious son of Germany and a friend of Bolesław the Brave, can rightly be regarded as the patron of a deeper friendship between Germany and Poland.