Altmann of Passau

Altmann of Passau was an eleventh-century bishop, church reformer, and monastic founder in the German kingdom of the Holy Roman Empire. He was born in the early eleventh century into a noble family in Westphalia. After a clerical education he was attached to the cathedral of Paderborn, where he served as master of the cathedral school. He later became chaplain to Emperor Henry III and was made a canon and subsequently provost of the collegiate church of St. Mary at Aachen, a prominent imperial church. In 1064–1065 he took part in the large German pilgrimage to Jerusalem, an expedition of bishops, nobles, and clergy that met with severe hardship in the Near East. After his return he was appointed Bishop of Passau in 1065. The diocese he received was one of the largest in the empire, stretching from the Bavarian forest far eastward along the Danube into the Eastern March, the later Austria.

From the outset of his episcopate Altmann identified himself with the programme of church reform associated with the contemporary papacy. He sought to enforce clerical celibacy, to suppress simony, and to impose a common life on his cathedral clergy after the manner of canons regular. Around 1070 he founded the house of St. Nikola outside Passau for canons living under the Rule of St. Augustine. He also worked to reform older religious houses in the eastern parts of his diocese. In 1083 he established a new monastery on the hill of Göttweig, above the Danube near Krems, again for canons regular; the community was later transformed into a Benedictine abbey. Through these foundations, and through a reputation for personal austerity, he became one of the principal agents of canonical and monastic reform in Bavaria and the Austrian lands in the later eleventh century.

His loyalty to Pope Gregory VII during the Investiture Controversy shaped the second half of his career. Altmann refused to follow King Henry IV in the breach with Rome, and the pope employed him as a legate in Germany. That stance cost him control of his cathedral city. Royal troops occupied Passau in 1077 and 1078, the town suffered damage, and the bishop was driven into exile. Thereafter he resided mainly in the Austrian portion of the diocese, where the Babenberg margraves generally favoured the Gregorian party. A royalist synod at Mainz in 1085 declared him deposed, but the sentence was disregarded by those who remained obedient to Rome. Despite displacement from Passau he continued to ordain clergy, dedicate churches, and protect reform monasteries until the end of his life.

Altmann died on 8 August 1091 at Zeiselmauer in the Austrian lands of his see and was buried at Göttweig. An anonymous monk of that abbey composed a Latin life of the bishop in the twelfth century, which remains the principal narrative source for his career. He has been venerated as a saint in the Diocese of Passau and at Göttweig since the Middle Ages, with a feast on 8 August. He was never the object of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval or modern type; his cult is a traditional local one, bound up with the Gregorian reform, the early history of Göttweig Abbey, and the medieval bishopric of Passau.