Majolus

Majolus, also known as Mayeul, Maiolus, or Maieul, was a Benedictine monk and the fourth abbot of Cluny, and one of the principal figures of tenth-century monastic reform in Western Europe. He was born in the early tenth century at Avignon in Provence to a family of the local nobility. Left an orphan while still young, he was educated at Lyon, then among the leading schools of the Kingdom of Burgundy. He became a canon of the cathedral of Mâcon and was ordained priest. Contemporary accounts present him as a man of learning and austere life; he declined election to the bishopric of Besançon rather than abandon the clerical and later monastic vocation he preferred.

Attracted by the observance already established at Cluny under Abbot Aymard, Majolus entered that monastery in the middle of the tenth century. He was made librarian and subsequently claustral prior. After Aymard was stricken with blindness, Majolus was named coadjutor and governed the abbey in practice; he became sole abbot following Aymard’s death. Under his long abbacy Cluny consolidated its independence, its exemption from local episcopal control, and its role as the head of a growing family of reformed houses. Majolus visited and restored monasteries in Burgundy, Aquitaine, Provence, and Italy, imposing the Cluniac customary and securing royal and papal privileges that strengthened the congregation.

He moved easily in the highest political circles of his age. The Ottonian emperors Otto I and Otto II, the Empress Adelaide, and the early Capetian court all sought his counsel. In 972, while crossing the Alps, he was captured by Muslim raiders operating from their base at Fraxinetum on the Provençal coast and was held until the monks of Cluny paid a substantial ransom. The outrage of his abduction helped provoke the campaign in which Count William of Provence destroyed Fraxinetum and ended the raids. Later tradition, supported by tenth- and eleventh-century sources, holds that the imperial court offered him the papacy after the death of Benedict VI and that he refused the office.

Majolus spent his last years still travelling in the interests of reform and of the houses dependent on Cluny. He died on 11 May 994 at the Cluniac priory of Souvigny in the Bourbonnais and was buried there. Pilgrims soon resorted to his tomb, and he was honoured as a saint from the generation after his death, without a later formal papal canonization of the kind that became standard in subsequent centuries. His feast is observed on 11 May. His disciple and successor Odilo, and later Hugh of Cluny, inherited and greatly expanded the monastic network whose stability and prestige Majolus had done much to establish.