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Biography

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Gero was a tenth-century Saxon nobleman and prelate who served as Archbishop of Cologne from 969 until his death in 976. He belonged to a prominent family of the East Saxon aristocracy. His father was Count Christian, who held counties in the Nordthüringgau and the Schwabengau in the region of Serimunt, and his mother Hidda was a sister of the powerful Margrave Gero, known as Gero the Great, who expanded Saxon authority east of the Elbe until his death in 965. Through this connection the archbishop was a nephew of the margrave and a brother of Thietmar, who became margrave of the Saxon eastern march. The family's standing at the Ottonian court helps explain Gero's later elevation to one of the most important sees in the German kingdom.

After the death of Archbishop Folkmar in 969, Emperor Otto I appointed Gero to the archbishopric of Cologne. The see had recently been held by Otto's own brother, Archbishop Bruno, who had made Cologne a center of imperial church policy and monastic reform. Gero thus inherited a church closely tied to the Ottonian dynasty. As archbishop he ranked among the leading ecclesiastical princes of the realm and would have taken part in the liturgical, administrative, and political duties of a Rhenish metropolitan, including oversight of suffragan bishops and the great monastic houses of the diocese.

In 971 Otto I entrusted Gero with a major diplomatic mission to the Byzantine court at Constantinople. The emperor sought a marriage alliance between his son and heir, Otto II, and a princess of the Byzantine imperial house. Gero negotiated with Emperor John I Tzimiskes and returned with Theophanu, a relative of the Byzantine emperor rather than a porphyrogenita born in the purple, a substitution that some Western observers later criticized. Gero escorted Theophanu to Italy, where her marriage to Otto II was celebrated in Rome in April 972. The embassy is one of the best-documented episodes of Ottonian-Byzantine relations in the tenth century and shows the confidence Otto I placed in the Cologne archbishop.

Gero is remembered in art history for his association with the Gero Cross, a life-sized wooden crucifix still preserved in Cologne Cathedral. Tradition and much modern scholarship attribute the work to his patronage in the years around 970. It is among the earliest surviving monumental sculptures of the dead Christ in northern Europe and a landmark of Ottonian art. Gero died on 29 June 976 and was buried in Cologne Cathedral. The crucifix was later associated with his tomb. He was succeeded as archbishop by Warin. Beyond the Constantinopolitan embassy and the famous cross, the surviving narrative sources give only a limited picture of his episcopate, as is often the case even for prominent tenth-century bishops.

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