My Patron Saint for 2009

St. Marquard of Hildesheim (Bishop and Martyr)

I don't know much about him. His feast day is February 2nd and he is a martyr. In fact, he was one of the martyrs at the Battle of Ebsdorf

The following is from Butler's Lives of the Saints:

February 2nd. The Martyrs of Ebsdorf (A.D. 880)

The winter of 880 was one of such extreme severity that the Rhine and the Main were frozen hard. The young king Louis III, who had spent Christmas at Frankfurt, had great difficulties in contending with incursions of Northmen,w ho were forming settlements on the Scheldt and pressing south. An army under Duke Bruno, the queen's brother, was caught on the heath of Luneburg at Ebsdorf in Saxony and hemmed in by melting ice and snow. The pagan North men descended upon them where there was no place to give battle and utterly overwhelmed them, killing Bruno, together with Theodoic, or Dietrich, the saintly old bishop of Minden and Bishop Marquard of Hildesheim, as well as eleven nobles and fourteen of the king's bodyguard and their attendants. The rest of the army were either driven into the swamps and rowned or taken prisoners. Some fo the accounts say that two other bishops, Erlulf of Werden and Gosbert of Osnabruck, were among those massacred, but they were actually martyred at an earlier date. Other records give seven martyred bishops, but the whole episode has been so much mixed up with legend that it is impossible to arrive at any certainty. The relics of the martyrs were regarded wtih the greatest veneration in the church of the Benedictine abbey which was subsequently erected on this spot.

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