HAITO (HATTO). - Bishop of Basel, born of a noble Swabian family in 763. At the age of five he was received into the monastery of Reichenau, where he made such great progress in his studies that the abbot Waldo (786-806) placed him in charge of the monastic school. When the latter, in 806, was transferred to the Parisian abbey of St. Denis, H. succeeded him; but almost at the same time he was made bishop of Basel.

He displayed great zeal in the rebuilding of the Cathedral and in the reform of the clergy; he also rebuilt the abbey church of Reichenau. Charlemagne, who held him in high esteem, entrusted him in 811 with a diplomatic mission to Constantinople. Because of illness, in 823 he resigned from the double office of bishop and abbot and spent the rest of his days as a simple monk at Reichenau, where he died on 17 March 836.

He wrote several works, among them the Hodoeporicon, a kind of diary of his mission in the East; Libellus de visione et obitu Wetini monachi Angiensis (PL 105, 771-80;

MGH, Poetae Latini medii aevi. Poetae Latini aevi Carolini, II, pp. 267-75), which could figure among the sources of the Divine Comedy; the Capitulare of his diocese (PL 105, 763-68; MGH, Legum Sectio II Capitularia Regum Francorum, I, pp. 363-66; Mansi, XIV, 393-98).

Bibliography5 works

BIBL.: J. A. Fabricius, Bibliotheca mediae et infimae Latinitatis, I, Florence 1858, p. 33; PL 105, 761-62; L. Vautrey, Histoire des évêques de Bâle, I, Einsiedeln 1884, pp. 61-68; C. Schrodl, s. v. in Kirchenlexikon, V (1888), coll. 1454-56; F. J. Schaefer, s. v. in Cath. Enc., VII, pp. 115-18.

Francesco Russo

@incollection{ec6_haito_hatto, author = {Russo, Francesco}, title = {Haito (Hatto)}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {VI}, pages = {1337--1338}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1951}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/haito-hatto} }

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