medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
5. February is also the feast day of:
Domitianus (and Maria) of Carinthia (d. ca. 800?). The former Benedictine monastery of the Holy Savior and All the Saints at Millstatt in today's Spittal an der Drau (Kärnten) had from the later twelfth century onward a double foundation story: the first church on the site had been founded by D., a duke of Carinthia in the time of Charlemagne and much later the monastery itself had been founded by the Bavarian Pfalzgraf Aribo or Arbo and by his brother Poto. Aribo (who is recorded as owning two churches at Millstatt), Poto, and their founding are datable to the later eleventh century. The monastery itself is first documented from the early 1120s, when it came under papal protection and ceased to be the property of its founders' family (though a branch thereof, the counts of Görz, remained its hereditary protectors until 1389).
D. first appears in a Vita et Miracula (BHL 2248) datable to between 1166 and 1177/80 in which his tomb, also containing the remains of his wife Maria and those of an unnamed child, is said to have been discovered during a rebuilding of the abbey church under abbot Otto I (1122/24-1166). According to that text, D. had a tombstone there that said _Hic requiescit beatus Domitianus dux, primus fundator huius ecclesiae, qui convertit istum populum ad christianitatem ab infidelitate_ ("Here rests Domitianus the duke, the first founder of this church, who converted this populace to Christianity from heathenism").
Modern scholarship used to view this as a twelfth-century fiction. But the discovery, during a restoration of the church's interior in 1988/89, of part of the upper right corner of a Carolingian-period funerary inscription that apparently refers to paganism (the pretty clearly preserved letters GANITA are almost cetainly from a case-form of _paganitas_) and whose subject's name, only partly preserved, has been reasonably though not conclusively reconstructed as Domicianus, has thrown a new light on things. It now appears that a Carolingian worthy whose name was read in the twelfth century as Domicianus or Domitianus had been buried in the church and that at the time of the inscription's creation D. may well have been credited with the conversion of the populace to Christianity.
It is also clear that if the author of the Vita was referring to the monument whose fragment has been preserved he was not concerned to provide a strictly literal rendering of its inscription. In particular, there is no room in the fragment for BEATVS between the IT of _[(re)quiesc]IT_ and D.'s name and thus no evidence that his having received a cult prior to the twelfth century, when abbot Otto gave D. an Elevatio at the time of the re-interment in a new tomb of the remains of D., M., and the child. How Otto knew that D.'s wife was named Maria (he had that name incised on the new tomb) or if instead he just gave it to her is not known. The remains of all three are said to have been removed to the church's sacristy in 1441. A confraternity in D.'s honor is recorded from Millstatt in 1405. D. was venerated at the abbey's possessions in at least the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The monastery was given to the Knights of St. Heorge in 1469 and to the Jesuits in 1598 and was closed in 1773. Its church was transferred to the diocese of Gurk. In recent years the diocese of Gurk-Klagenfurt has renewed D.'s cult officially, celebrating him liturgically on his traditional day of 5. February; Maria receives an unofficial veneration as well. Both have yet to grace the pages of the RM.
D.'s tomb is long gone but his twelfth-century reliquary shrine has survived. Here's a view:
http://tinyurl.com/l96wmx
D. as depicted in an earlier fifteenth-century fresco (1429) in the Stiftskirche at Millstatt:
http://tinyurl.com/me234d
http://www.burgenseite.com/faschen/millstatt_ritter_149.jpg
D. as depicted by Thomas of Villach on a wing (now in the Museum der Stadt Villach) of a now dismembered later fifteenth-century altarpiece:
http://www.villach.at/bilder/inhalt/Domitian1%281%29.jpg
Christie's sale notes on this piece:
http://tinyurl.com/ye6fnvf
D. at right in a late fifteenth-century (ca. 1490-1500) fresco over the entrance to the former monastery precinct at Millstatt:
http://tinyurl.com/yznfuoq
Best,
John Dillon
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