Engelbert

Engelbert, known as Engelbert of Cologne and as Engelbert I of Berg, was a thirteenth-century archbishop and imperial prince of the Holy Roman Empire. He was born in the later twelfth century, usually placed around 1185, at Schloss Burg on the Wupper, the ancestral seat of the counts of Berg in the Lower Rhine country. He was a son of Count Engelbert I of Berg and Margaret of Guelders. As a younger noble intended for the Church, he received the education and preferment typical of high aristocratic clerics, holding canonries and provostships at Cologne and other churches while still a young man.

In 1216 he was elected Archbishop of Cologne and was consecrated the following year after a papal dispensation on account of his age. The see carried ducal authority over Westphalia and Engern, so he became at once a major spiritual and temporal ruler. He worked to restore order after earlier schism and civil conflict, strengthening towns, supporting religious houses, and asserting ecclesiastical rights. Emperor Frederick II, occupied in Italy and Sicily, made him guardian of the young King Henry (VII) and imperial administrator in Germany from 1220, placing much of the government of the German kingdom in his hands for several years. After the death of his brother Count Adolf of Berg, Engelbert also stood at the head of his family’s patrimonial interests in Berg.

His determination to keep the peace, protect church property, and restrain lesser nobles created lasting enmities. The gravest quarrel was with his kinsman Count Frederick of Isenberg, over the Abbey of Essen, of which the archbishop was protector, and over alleged seizures of ecclesiastical goods. On 7 November 1225, while travelling from Soest toward Schwelm, Engelbert was ambushed in a wooded defile near Gevelsberg by Frederick and a group of conspirators. He was struck with many wounds and died there. Contemporary writers, above all the Cistercian Caesar of Heisterbach, presented the killing as martyrdom suffered in defence of the Church’s rights. Frederick was later outlawed, captured, and executed.

Engelbert’s body was taken to Cologne and buried in the cathedral. Reports of miracles at the tomb encouraged an immediate local cult. He has been venerated as a martyr in the Rhineland ever since, with a feast on 7 November, and he is entered in later martyrologies, although a formal papal canonization of the later medieval type is not clearly documented. His memory remains tied to Cologne Cathedral, to the medieval county and duchy of Berg, and to the politics of the German kingdom in the Hohenstaufen age.