Eberhard of Salzburg

Eberhard of Salzburg, often called Eberhard of Biburg, belonged to the Bavarian high nobility of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. He was born about 1085 into the family of the Counts of Sittling and Biburg, who held estates in Lower Bavaria. Destined for the Church, he received a clerical education at the cathedral school of Bamberg, then a leading centre of learning in the German kingdom, and was received as a canon of Bamberg Cathedral. The reforming circle associated with Bishop Otto of Bamberg shaped his early formation. After a period among the secular canons he entered the Benedictine abbey of Prüfening near Regensburg, a house linked to the Hirsau reform and to a strict reading of the Rule of Saint Benedict.

In the early 1130s his own family founded a Benedictine monastery at Biburg. Eberhard became its first abbot and held the office for more than a decade. As abbot he organized the community, secured its endowments, and gained a reputation for personal austerity, prudence, and charity. Those qualities, together with his birth and Bamberg connections, made him a natural choice when the see of Salzburg fell vacant. In 1147 the cathedral chapter elected him archbishop in succession to Conrad I. He accepted, received episcopal consecration, and was granted the pallium. The archbishopric was both a large metropolitan province and a temporal principality within the Holy Roman Empire, stretching across much of what is now Austria and adjoining Bavarian lands.

As archbishop he combined monastic seriousness with the duties of a prince of the Empire. He supported Benedictine, Cistercian, and Premonstratensian houses, encouraged churches and hospitals, and pressed for clerical discipline. He also had to defend the rights of his church against secular magnates, which he did firmly but without the harshness of some contemporaries. The crisis of his later years was the papal schism that followed the death of Pope Adrian IV in 1159. A double election produced Alexander III and the imperial antipope Victor IV. Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa demanded that the German bishops recognize Victor. Eberhard, almost alone among the prelates of the empire, declared for Alexander III and did not waver, holding that the liberty of the Church could not be settled by imperial will.

He was not a mere partisan. Chroniclers present him as a peacemaker who used the respect the emperor had for his sanctity to urge reconciliation and to shield his diocese from the worst of the conflict. He spoke with candor to both pope and emperor. In the summer of 1164, while travelling in the Styrian parts of his province, he fell ill and was taken to the Cistercian abbey of Rein near Graz, where he died on 22 June. His body was brought to Salzburg and buried in the cathedral. Miracles were reported at his tomb, and he was honoured as a saint in Salzburg and among Benedictines. His feast is 22 June. No papal bull of canonization in the later medieval form is known, but his cult was established in the later twelfth century. He is remembered as a reforming monk-bishop, a defender of Alexander III, and a rare moderating voice in the struggle between empire and papacy.