ANSGAR, Saint. - Archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen, apostle of Scandinavia, b. in 801 in northern France, d. at Bremen on 3 February 865. He was educated in the monastery of Corbie in Picardy, where he took the monastic habit. His superiors summoned him to teach first in the monastery where he had begun his religious life, 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 Autbert, but had to leave it in 827, without having been able to erect a single church. In 829 the Swedish king Björn asked the emperor Louis the Pious to send him missionaries, and A. went there together with his confrere Wittmar. In the spring of the following year they landed at Birka (Björkö), a small island in Lake Mälar, then the political and commercial center of Sweden. Soon, however (831), they had to leave the mission. Louis the Pious, seeking to create a base for the apostolate among the Nordic peoples, having erected the diocese of Hamburg, independent of any metropolitan, chose A. as its first bishop. Gregory IV appointed him archbishop and his legate for all of Scandinavia. Having left Gaubert in Sweden, he reserved for himself, besides the care of the diocese, the apostolate in Denmark, but had to limit himself 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 income had been assigned by the emperor in 831 to the maintenance of the poor diocese of A.
By the Treaty of Verdun (843), Thourout fell under the dominion of Charles the Bald and A. lost, along with the resources of the monastery, also his collaborators. The sack of Hamburg by the Normans in 843 destroyed the missions and he was forced to abandon the country. He became bishop of Bremen, to which the diocese of Hamburg was united. Having then obtained freedom of preaching, A. erected churches at Schleswig and at 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 in the episcopal see after his death (3 February 865) and wrote his life. Political circumstances and the enormous difficulties inherent in the undertaking meant that the success of A.'s apostolate proved quite modest. The fact remains, however, that he placed the Christianity of Birka, Schleswig and Ribe on solid foundations and definitively left the legation for the Nordic missions to the diocese of Hamburg-Bremen. Unfortunately, A.'s work had no immediate continuators.