Monte Cassino

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Monte Cassino

For information about the World War II
World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a Participants in World War II, including all of the great powers, organised into two opposing military alliances: the Allies of World War II and the Axis powers....
battle, see the Battle of Monte Cassino
Battle of Monte Cassino

The Battle of Monte Cassino was a costly series of four battles during World War II, fought by the Allies of World War II with the intention of breaking through the Winter Line and seizing Rome....
.

Monte Cassino is a rocky hill about 130 km (80 miles) southeast of Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital city of Italy and Lazio, and is Italy's largest and most populous city, with 2,724,347 residents in an urban area of some ....
, Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia....
, c. 2 km to the west of the town of Cassino (the Roman Casinum
Casinum

Casinum, an ancient town of Italy, probably of Volscian origin. Varro states that the name was Sabine, and meant forum vetus, and also that the town itself was Samnite, but he is probably wrong....
having been on the hill) and 520 m altitude.

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History

The monastery was constructed on an older pagan site, a temple

Temple

A temple is a structure reserved for religious or spiritual activities, such as prayer and sacrifice, or analogous rites. A ??templum?? constituted a sacred precinct as defined by a priest, or augur....
of Apollo

Apollo

In Greek mythology and Roman mythology, Apollo , is one of the most important and many-sided of the Twelve Olympians. The ideal of the kouros , Apollo has been variously recognized as a god of light and the sun; truth and prophecy; archery; medicine and healing; music, poetry, and the arts; and more....
that crowned the hill, enclosed by a fortifying wall above the small town of Cassino, still largely pagan

Paganism

Paganism is the blanket term given to describe religions and spiritual practices of pre-Christian Europe, and by extension a term for polytheistic?traditions or folk religion?worldwide seen from a Western or Christian viewpoint....
at the time and recently devastated by the Goths

Goths

The Goths were East Germanic tribes who, in the 3rd and 4th centuries, invasion the Roman Empire and later adopted Arian Christianity. In the 5th and 6th centuries, divided as the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths, they established powerful successor-states of the Roman Empire in the Iberian peninsula and Italy....
. Benedict's first act was to smash the sculpture of Apollo and destroy the altar. He rededicated the site to John the Baptist

John the Baptist

John the Baptist was a mission preacher and a major religious figure who led a movement of baptism at the Jordan River in expectation of a divine apocalypse that would restore occupied Israel....
. Once established there, Benedict never left. At Monte Cassino he wrote the Benedictine Rule

Rule of St Benedict

The Rule of Saint Benedict is a book of precepts written by Benedict of Nursia for monks living communally under the authority of an abbot. Since about the 7th century it has also been adopted by communities of women....
that became the founding principle for western monasticism

Monasticism

Monasticism is the religion practice in which one renounces world pursuits in order to fully devote one's life to spiritual work. The origin of the word is from Ancient Greek, and the idea was originally related to Christian monks....
. There at Monte Cassino he received a visit from Totila

Totila

Totila was king of the Ostrogoths from 541 until his death. He waged the Gothic War against the Byzantine Empire for the mastery of Italy. Most of the historical evidence for Totila consists of chronicles by the Byzantine historian Procopius, who accompanied the Byzantine general Belisarius during the Gothic War....
, king of the Ostrogoths, perhaps in 543 (the only remotely secure historical date for Benedict), and there he died.

Monte Cassino became a model for future developments. Unfortunately its protected site has always made it an object of strategic importance. It was sacked or destroyed a number of times. In 584, during the abbacy of Bonitus

Bonitus (abbot)

Bonitus of Monte Cassino was a Benedictine monk and abbot of the monastery of Monte Cassino. During his abbacy the monastery was plundered by the Lombards under Zoto of Benevento and Bonitus fled with his monks to the Lateran Hill in Rome, dying shortly afterwards....
, the Lombards

Lombards

The Lombards were a Germanic peoples originally from Northern Europe who settled in the valley of the Danube and from there invaded Byzantine Italian peninsula in 568 under the leadership of Alboin....
sacked the Abbey, and the surviving monks fled to Rome, where they remained for more than a century. During this time the body of St Benedict was transferred to Fleury, the modern Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire

Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire

Saint-Beno?t-sur-Loire is a Communes of France in the Loiret Departments of France in north-central France.This town hosts the Fleury Abbey, also known as the Abbaye de Saint Beno?t ....
near Orleans, France. A flourishing period of Monte Cassino followed its re-establishment in 718 by Abbot Petronax

Petronax of Monte Cassino

Saint Petronax of Monte Cassino , called "The Second Founder of Monte Cassino", was an Italians monk and abbot who rebuilt and repopulated the monastery of Monte Cassino, which had been destroyed by the invading Lombards in the late sixth century....
, when among the monks were Carloman, son of Charles Martel

Carloman, son of Charles Martel

Carloman was the eldest son of Charles Martel, major domo or mayor of the palace and duke of the Franks, and his wife Chrotrud. On Charles' death , Carloman and his brother Pippin the Short succeeded to their father's legal positions, Carloman in Austrasia, and Pippin in Neustria....
; Ratchis

Ratchis

Ratchis was the Duke of Friuli and King of the Lombards . His father was Pemmo of Friuli. His Rome wife was Tassia. He ruled in peace until he besieged, for reasons unknown, Perugia....
, predecessor of the great Lombard Duke and King Aistulf

Aistulf

Aistulf was the Duke of Friuli from 744, King of Lombards from 749, and Duchy of Spoleto from 751. His father was the Pemmo of Friuli.After his brother Ratchis became king, Aistulf succeeded him in Friuli....
; and Paul the Deacon

Paul the Deacon

Paul the Deacon , also known as Paulus Diaconus, Warnefred and Cassinensis, , was a Benedictine monk and historian of the Lombards....
, the historian of the Lombards. In 744, a donation of Gisulf II of Benevento

Gisulf II of Benevento

Gisulf II was the third last duke of Benevento before the fall of the Lombards. He ruled from 743, when King Liutprand came down and removed Godescalc of Benevento, to his death up to ten years later....
created the Terra Sancti Benedicti
Terra Sancti Benedicti

The Terra Sancti Benedicti was the secular territory, or seignory, of the powerful Abbey of Montecassino, the chief monastery of the Mezzogiorno and one of the first Western monasteries: founded by Benedict of Nursia himself, hence the name of its possessions....
, the secular lands of the abbacy, which were subject to the abbot and nobody else save the pope. Thus, the monastery became the capital of a state comprising a compact and strategic region between the Lombard principality of Benevento and the Byzantine city-states of the coast (Naples

Duchy of Naples

The Duchy of Naples began as a Byzantine Empire province that was constituted in the seventh century, in the reduced coastal lands that the Lombards had not conquered during their invasion of Italy in the sixth century....
, Gaeta

Duchy of Gaeta

The Duchy of Gaeta was an Early Middle Ages state centred on the coastal Mezzogiorno city of Gaeta. It began in the early ninth century as the local community began to grow autonomous as Byzantine Empire lagged in the Mediterranean and the peninsula thanks to Lombards and Saracens incursions....
, and Amalfi

Duchy of Amalfi

The Republic or Duchy of Amalfi was a de facto independent state centred on the Mezzogiorno city of the same name during the tenth and eleventh centuries....
). In 883 Saracens sacked and then burned it down. Among the great historians who worked at the monastery, in this period there is Erchempert

Erchempert

Erchempert was a monk of Monte Cassino in the final quarter of the ninth century. He chronicled a history of Lombards Benevento, giving especially vivid account of the violence surrounding his monastic retreat in his own day....
, whose Historia Langobardorum Beneventanorum is a fundamental chronicle of the ninth-century Mezzogiorno

Mezzogiorno

Southern Italy generally refers to the southern portion of the continental Italian peninsula historically forming the Kingdom of Naples. It encompasses the modern regions of Basilicata, Campania, Calabria, Apulia and Molise, which lie in Italy's south, and Abruzzo which is located in central Italy....
.

It was rebuilt and reached the apex of its fame in the 11th century under the abbot Desiderius (abbot 1058 - 1087), who later became Pope Victor III

Pope Victor III

Pope Victor III , born Daufer , Latinised Dauferius, was the Pope as the successor of Pope Gregory VII, yet his pontificate is far less impressive in history than his time as Desiderius, the great Abbot of Monte Cassino....
. The number of monks rose to over two hundred, and the library, the manuscripts produced in the scriptorium

Scriptorium

Scriptorium, literally "a place for writing", is commonly used to refer to a room in medieval European monasteries devoted to the copying of manuscripts by monastic scribes....
and the school of manuscript illuminators became famous throughout the West. The unique Beneventan script

Beneventan script

Beneventan script was a Middle Ages writing system, so called because it originated in the Duchy of Benevento in southern Italy. It was also called Langobarda, Longobarda, Longobardisca , or sometimes Gothica; it was first called Beneventan by palaeography Elias Avery Lowe....
flourished there during Desiderius' abbacy. The buildings of the monastery were reconstructed on a scale of great magnificence, artists being brought from Amalfi, Lombardy, and even Constantinople to supervise the various works. The abbey church, rebuilt and decorated with the utmost splendor, was consecrated in 1071 by Pope Alexander II

Pope Alexander II

Alexander II , born Anselmo da Baggio, was Pope from 1061 to 1073.He was born in Milan. As bishop of Lucca he had been an energetic coadjutor with Pope Gregory VII in endeavouring to suppress simony, and to enforce the clerical celibacy....
. A detailed account of the abbey at this date exists in the Chronica monasterii Cassinensis by Leo of Ostia

Leo of Ostia

Normans

The Normans were the people who gave their names to Normandy, a region in northern France. They descended from Viking conquerors of the territory and the native population of mostly Frankish and Gallo-Roman stock....
in the south.

Abbot Desiderius

Pope Victor III

Constantinople

Constantinople was the empire capital of the Roman Empire , the Byzantine Empire , the Latin Empire , and the Ottoman Empire . Strategically located between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara at the point where Europe meets Asia, Byzantine Constantinople had been the capital of a Christendom empire, successor to ancient ancient Greece...
some time after 1066 to hire expert Byzantine mosaicists for the decoration of the rebuilt abbey church. According to chronicler Leo of Ostia

Leo of Ostia

Leo Marsicanus or Ostiensis , also known as Leone dei Conti di Marsi , was a nobleman and monk of Monte Cassino around 1061 and Italian Cardinal from the twelfth century....
the Greek artists decorated the apse, the arch and the vestibule of the basilica. Their work was admired by contemporaries but was totally destroyed in later centuries except two fragments depicting greyhounds (now in the Monte Cassino Museum). "The abbot in his wisdom decided that great number of young monks in the monastery should be thoroughly initiated in these arts" - says the chronicler about the role of the Greeks in the revival of mosaic art in medieval Italy.

An earthquake damaged the Abbey in 1349, and although the site was rebuilt it marked the beginning of a long period of decline. In 1321, Pope John XXII

Pope John XXII

Pope John XXII , born Jacques Du?ze , was pope from 1316 to 1334. He was the second Pope of the Avignon Papacy , elected by a Papal conclave in Lyon assembled by Philip V of France....
made the church of Monte Cassino a cathedral, and the carefully preserved independence of the monastery from episcopal interference was at an end. In 1505 the monastery was joined with that of St. Justina of Padua. The site was sacked by Napoleon's troops in 1799 and from the dissolution of the Italian monasteries in 1866, Monte Cassino became a national monument. There was a final destruction on February 15, 1944 when during the Battle of Monte Cassino

Battle of Monte Cassino

The Battle of Monte Cassino was a costly series of four battles during World War II, fought by the Allies of World War II with the intention of breaking through the Winter Line and seizing Rome....
(January - May 1944), the entire building was pulverized in a series of heavy air-raids due to the mistaken belief it was a German stronghold. In fact the Abbey was being used as a refuge from the battle by the women and children of nearby Cassino. The Abbey was rebuilt after the war, financed by the Italian State. Pope Paul VI

Pope Paul VI

Pope Paul VI , born Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini , reigned as Pope of the Roman Catholic Church and monarch of Vatican City from 1963 to 1978....
reconsecrated it in 1964.

The archives, besides a vast number of documents relating to the history of the abbey, contained some 1400 irreplaceable manuscript codices

Codex

A codex is a book in the format used for modern books, with separate pages normally bound together and given a cover. It was a Roman invention that replaced the scroll, which was the first form of book in all Eurasian cultures....
, chiefly patristic and historical. They also contained the collections of the Keats-Shelley House in Rome which had been sent to the Abbey for safety in December 1942. By great foresight on the part of Lt.Col. Julius Schlegel (a Catholic), a Vienna-born German officer, and Captain Maximilian Becker (a Protestant), both from the Panzer-Division Hermann Göring, these were all transferred to the Vatican at the beginning of the battle.

Burials

Saint Apollinaris, abbot of Montecassino, feast day on November 27
Saint Benedict
Cardinal Domenico Bartolini (1813-87)
Saint John Gradenigo
Saint Bertharius
Saint Scholastica
Scholastica

Scholastica is a Roman Catholic Church saint. Born in Italy, she was the twin sister of St. Benedict of Nursia.St. Gregory the Great, in his Dialogues, tells us that she was a nun and leader of a community for women at Plombariola, about five miles from Benedict's abbey at Monte Cassino....
Sigelgaita of Salerno

External links

, Rev. Anthony Esposito, Society of St. Pius X - South Africa, retrieved Dec. 9, 2006

Monte Cassino

History

Burials

See also

External links