ANSARIUS, St. — Archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen, Apostle of Scandinavia, b. in 801 in northern France, d. at Bremen on 3 Feb. 865. He was educated in the monastery of Corbie in Picardy, where he took the monastic habit. His superiors called him to teach first in the monastery where he had begun his religious life, and then at New Corbie in Saxony, where another monastery had been founded. At the invitation of King Wala he set out for Denmark together with Auttherus, but had to leave in 827 without having been able to erect a single church. In 829 King Björn of Sweden asked Emperor Louis the Pious to send missionaries, and Ansarius went thither with his confrere Wittmarus. In the following spring they landed at Birka (Björkö), a small island in Lake Mälar, then the political and commercial centre of Sweden. Soon, however (831), they had to abandon the mission.
Louis the Pious, seeking to establish a base for the apostolate among the northern peoples, erected the diocese of Hamburg, independent of any metropolitan, and chose Ansarius as its first bishop. Gregory IV named him archbishop and his legate for all Scandinavia. Leaving Gauzbert in Sweden, he reserved for himself, in addition to the care of his diocese, the apostolate in Denmark, but was limited to the recruitment and education of young Danes destined for the apostolate in their homeland. They were instructed either at Hamburg or in the monastery of Thourout (Flanders), whose revenues had been assigned by the emperor in 831 to the support of Ansarius’s poor diocese.
By the Treaty of Verdun (843), Thourout fell under the rule of Charles the Bald, and Ansarius lost, along with the monastery’s resources, his collaborators as well. The sack of Hamburg by the Normans in 845 destroyed the missions, and he was forced to abandon the place. He became bishop of Bremen, to which the diocese of Hamburg was united. Later, having obtained freedom to preach, Ansarius built churches at Schleswig and Ribe. In 853 or 854 he reached Sigtuna to resume the missions in Sweden, where King Olaf granted freedom of worship. He was succeeded in the mission by his disciple Rimbert, who also followed him on the episcopal see after his death (3 Feb. 865) and wrote his life. The political circumstances and the extraordinary difficulties inherent in the enterprise meant that the success of Ansarius’s apostolate was very modest. Yet it remains true that he laid solid foundations for Christianity at Birka, Schleswig, and Ribe and definitively entrusted the legation for the Nordic missions to the diocese of Hamburg. Bremen. Unfortunately, Ansarius’s work had no immediate successors.