Killed for a Purse That Did Not Exist
Imagine giving up everything to serve God in a place where you barely speak the language.
Then imagine being murdered on a winter night, not by an enemy of the faith, but by thieves who wanted money you did not have.
That is how five monks died in Poland in the year 1003. They were not famous. They had not yet baptized a single recorded convert. They had come to a half-pagan frontier to pray and to prepare for a mission, and the mission never began. Robbers broke into their hermitage at night, convinced there was gold inside, and killed every man they found. There was no gold. There was a chapel, a few cells, and the psalms.
By the standards of the world, it was a waste: five lives spent for nothing, in an obscure corner of Europe, at the hands of men who were themselves baptized Christians.
The Church saw it differently. She counted these five as martyrs, and she was right to. They are the saints for anyone whose work was cut short, whose plans came to nothing, or whose suffering seems to have no meaning. The record of their lives is thin, but what remains makes a plain claim: what looks like failure is not always failure. Sometimes the seed has to fall to the ground and die first.
A Frontier Church Four Decades Old
Poland around the year 1000 was a young Christian country. Its first ruler we know by name, Mieszko, had accepted baptism in 966. His son, Boleslaw, later called "the Brave," was building a powerful state, and he understood that a strong kingdom needed a strong Church.
The faith was real but new, and the borders of the Christian world were close. To the north and east lived pagan peoples. In 997, the bishop Adalbert of Prague, whom the Poles call Wojciech, was killed by pagan Prussians on a missionary journey, and Boleslaw bought his body back so it could rest in Gniezno. In the year 2000, the young emperor Otto III made a pilgrimage to that tomb, and the Church in Poland was organized under its own archbishop. It was a moment of great hope.
At the same time, people were looking for missionaries. And they were looking in a particular direction: toward the hermits of Saint Romuald.
Romuald was an Italian monk who had founded a new kind of religious life, the Camaldolese, built on solitude, silence, prayer and the psalms. His hermits lived in small cells and spent their days in a quiet that was almost severe. Among his disciples was a young man named Bruno of Querfurt, who would become a missionary bishop and the author of the earliest account of the five brothers. The circle around Romuald, near Ravenna, was one of the most intense centers of spiritual life in Italy, and it was a surprising source for apostles. These were men who had left the world. Now they were being asked to go back out into it.
Two Italian Hermits and a Language They Did Not Speak
Benedict and John were two of those hermits. They lived in the hermitage at Pereum, near Ravenna, in the school of Romuald, and around the year 1001 or 1002 they were invited to Poland. They came, according to the historians, by a northern route through Bavaria, Bohemia and Silesia, a long and difficult journey for men who had spent their lives in one quiet place.
They arrived with a plan. They would found a hermitage, live the monastic life as Romuald had taught them, and prepare to preach to the pagans of the region. They would not do it with weapons or with the backing of an army. They would do it by prayer first, and by words once they could speak.
The problem was that they could not. Benedict and John did not speak Slavic. They were strangers in a place whose language, customs and people they did not know, and a missionary who cannot be understood is a missionary in name only.
So they were joined by two Polish men, Isaac and Matthew, who came to learn the monastic life and who helped the Italians with the language. They were the interpreters, the teachers, the bridge. Alongside them was a fifth man named Christinus, who lived with the hermits as a servant, a lay brother who cared for the practical needs of the community. A sixth member of the group, Barnabas, a younger Pole, was also with them.
Notice who these five are. Two are scholars of the monastic life, trained in one of the most rigorous schools in Italy. Two are local men, new to the life and essential to the mission. One is a servant, in the lowest rank of the house. The Church would later name all five as martyrs, without distinction. In the account of their death, no one is ranked above anyone else.
A Journey to Rome Waiting for Money
The hermits' mission had a legal problem. To preach to the pagans with the Church's blessing, they needed the approval of the pope. So the plan was for one of them, Benedict, to travel to Rome and ask for permission to carry out their missionary work.
A journey like that took resources. The duke, Boleslaw, who supported the hermits, gave them money to pay for the expedition. It was a large sum by the standards of a poor hermitage, and it was meant for a good purpose: to secure the pope's approval for a mission to the pagans.
It is here that the story turns toward its ending. Money has a way of becoming known. Somewhere, in the borderlands around the hermitage, the word got out that the monks had a store of gold. The hermits themselves were living in poverty. But gossip does not distinguish between a gift meant for a journey and a fortune for the taking.
What Five Men Had Already Chosen
The question that matters for any martyr is not only how they died, but what they were doing before. These five had already, in a real sense, given their lives away.
A hermit's vocation is a kind of daily dying. He leaves family, comfort, homeland and the ordinary shape of life, and he gives his days to prayer in a small room. For Benedict and John, that meant leaving Italy and the company of Romuald to go to a land they did not know. For Isaac and Matthew, it meant leaving ordinary life to follow a way that most of their neighbors would have found baffling. For Christinus, it meant serving, quietly and without credit, the men whose work was prayer.
The accounts do not give us their inner struggles, and we should not invent them. Some of the hardest parts of a vocation are never recorded. What we do know is that they stayed. The mission was slow, the language was hard, the winters were cold, and there were no results to point to. A man who leaves his home for an apostolate that has not yet borne fruit is a man who has already said yes to something more than success.
A Prayer Cell on the Frontier
What did the five actually do? Mostly, they prayed. They built a small hermitage in the western borderlands of Greater Poland, near the town of Międzyrzecz, in the region where the Polish state met the German lands. Local tradition in the area around Kazimierz Biskupi, near Konin, also keeps their memory, and historians have long debated exactly where the hermitage stood. They lived together by a rule of prayer and psalms, with a chapel at the center of their life, following the monastic way they had brought from Italy.
It does not look like much from the outside. There were no sermons to crowds, no great conversions, no cathedral built. But a hermitage on a frontier is its own kind of apostolate. It is a place where the people nearby can see a different way of living: men who pray at night, who own almost nothing, who welcome the stranger, who do not carry weapons. For people who had been raised on warriors and chieftains, that was a sermon in itself.
The Polish brothers' work on the language was the other half of the mission. Every word Isaac and Matthew taught the Italians was a step toward the day when Benedict and John could speak to the pagans in their own tongue. They were building, quietly, the thing every missionary needs first: the ability to be understood.
They did not get the chance to use it.
Two Years of Almost Nothing
The real trial of the five brothers was not a persecution. It was the long, slow stretch of time with nothing to show for it.
They had been in Poland for perhaps a year or two. They had no recorded converts. The journey to Rome had not yet been made. They lived under the protection of a duke whose ambitions were large and whose methods were sometimes violent, and Bruno of Querfurt himself would later criticize Boleslaw in blunt terms. The brothers were clients of a powerful man, living at the edge of his territory, with no army of their own and no walls.
A missionary mission can look like a failure for a very long time before it looks like anything else. This is the trial the Church often asks of its workers, and it is harder than it sounds: to keep praying in the place where you were sent when nothing seems to be happening, and when the people nearby do not yet understand why you came.
The Night of November 10
The end came on the night of November 10, 1003.
The robbers who came to the hermitage believed there was gold inside. They broke in at night. The earliest account of what followed, written by Bruno of Querfurt about five years afterward, presents the brothers as men at home in their house of prayer, not men preparing to fight. Nothing in the record suggests that they resisted, and everything about the way they had lived suggests they would not have.
The robbers killed five of them: Benedict, John, Matthew, Isaac and Christinus. Barnabas, the younger member of the group, was spared.
And then they discovered what the whole story turns on. There was no treasure. The money the duke had given was not there to be found, or it was not what they imagined. They had killed five men of prayer for nothing.
There is a deep irony in the way they died. Benedict was to travel to Rome to obtain permission to preach the Gospel, and the money that was meant to fund it became the reason for the killing. The mission that had not yet begun ended before it started, and the men who had come to proclaim Christ were silenced before they could speak.
What of the killers? When Duke Boleslaw learned of the crime, he did not simply execute them. According to Bruno's account, the murderers were sentenced to lifelong penance in an abbey that the duke founded on the site of the desecrated hermitage. The place where five monks were killed became a place of prayer maintained by their murderers, doing penance for the rest of their lives.
Why the Church Calls Them Martyrs
The Church did not have an easy question to answer about these five. They were not killed by pagans. They were not killed because they refused to renounce Christ. They were killed by thieves, who were themselves Christians, for money. By one definition of martyrdom, that does not qualify.
But the Church looked at the whole picture. These men had come to Poland to bring the Gospel. They had given up their homes for it. They died because of that mission, because the duke's gift for their journey to Rome was what drew the robbers. They died in their house of prayer, at the hands of men who had no reason to kill them except the work they had come to do. Tradition holds that Pope John XVIII recognized them as martyrs, and the Church has honored them as such ever since. Their death, in the Church's reading, was the final act of a life already offered to God.
The Seed of the Polish Church
The five brothers faded for a time from memory. But their story did not disappear. Bruno's account of their lives, written within about five years of their deaths, was lost to most readers and was not rediscovered until 1883. But the people of the region never forgot the hermits, and their devotion survived.
The cult of the five spread from the area around Kazimierz Biskupi, and in the seventeenth century a Camaldolese monastery was founded in Bieniszew, in Greater Poland, which honors them as the first Polish Camaldolese monks. In 2003, a thousand years after their deaths, thousands of pilgrims gathered there to celebrate the anniversary.
In 1997, Pope John Paul II visited the region and held the brothers up as witnesses to the faith. He called them the first martyrs on Polish soil and pointed to the Church's own liturgical prayer, which thanks God for sanctifying the beginnings of the faith in Poland through the blood of these five men. He drew a clear lesson: that their silence and prayer in the hermitage was the preparation for their witness, and that the certainty of victory which marked them has marked the Church's martyrs in every age.
On their canonization. In the early centuries after the year 1000, the Church recognized her martyrs by common consent, and the five brothers were honored soon after their deaths. Tradition names Pope John XVIII as the pope who recognized them.
Prayer
O God, who made holy the beginnings of the faith in Poland by the blood of your servants Benedict, John, Matthew, Isaac and Christinus, teach us to trust you when our work seems to come to nothing. Give us the patience of those who pray before they speak, and the courage of those who stay when nothing seems to be happening. Through their prayers, make fruitful every offering we make in secret, and bring us with them to the joy that has no end. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Holy Martyred Brothers, Pray for us.
