- For information about the World War II battle, see the Battle of Monte
Cassino
.
The restored Abbey of Monte
Cassino.
Monte Cassino is a rocky
hill about 130 km (80 miles) southeast of Rome
, Italy
, c.
2 km
to the west of the town of Cassino
(the Roman
Casinum having been on the hill)
and 520 m altitude. St.
Benedict of Nursia established his first
monastery, the source of the
Benedictine Order, here around 529.
It was the site of
Battle of Monte
Cassino in 1944. The site has been visited many
times by the Popes and other senior clergy, including a visit by
Pope
Benedict XVI in May 2009. The
monastery is one of the few remaining
territorial abbeys within the
Catholic Church.
History
The monastery was constructed on an older pagan site, a
temple of
Apollo that crowned
the hill, enclosed by a fortifying wall above the small town of
Cassino, still largely
pagan at the time
and recently devastated by the
Goths.
Benedict's first act was to smash the sculpture of Apollo and
destroy the altar. He rededicated the site to
John the Baptist. Once established there,
Benedict never left. At Monte Cassino he wrote the
Benedictine Rule that became the
founding principle for western
monasticism. There at Monte Cassino he received
a visit from
Totila, king of the Ostrogoths,
perhaps in 543 (the only remotely secure historical date for
Benedict), and there he died.
View across the valley.
Monte Cassino became a model for future developments. Unfortunately
its protected site has always made it an object of strategic
importance. It was sacked or destroyed a number of times. In 584,
during the abbacy of
Bonitus, the
Lombards sacked the Abbey, and the
surviving monks fled to Rome, where they remained for more than a
century.
During this time the body of St Benedict was
transferred to Fleury, the modern Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire
near Orleans, France. A flourishing period
of Monte Cassino followed its re-establishment in 718 by
Abbot Petronax, when among the
monks were
Carloman, son
of Charles Martel;
Ratchis, predecessor
of the great Lombard Duke and King
Aistulf;
and
Paul the Deacon, the historian
of the Lombards. In 744, a donation of
Gisulf II of Benevento created the
Terra Sancti
Benedicti, the secular lands of the abbacy, which were
subject to the abbot and nobody else save the pope. Thus, the
monastery became the capital of a state comprising a compact and
strategic region between the Lombard
principality of Benevento and the
Byzantine city-states of the coast (
Naples,
Gaeta,
and
Amalfi). In 883
Saracens sacked and then burned it down, and Abbot
Bertharius was killed during the attack.
Among the great historians who worked at the monastery, in this
period there is
Erchempert, whose
Historia Langobardorum Beneventanorum is a fundamental
chronicle of the ninth-century
Mezzogiorno.
The façade of the church.
It was rebuilt and reached the apex of its fame in the 11th century
under the abbot Desiderius (abbot 1058 - 1087), who later became
Pope Victor III. The number of monks
rose to over two hundred, and the library, the manuscripts produced
in the
scriptorium and the school of
manuscript illuminators became famous throughout the West. The
unique
Beneventan script
flourished there during Desiderius' abbacy. The buildings of the
monastery were reconstructed on a scale of great magnificence,
artists being brought from Amalfi, Lombardy, and even
Constantinople to supervise the various works. The abbey church,
rebuilt and decorated with the utmost splendor, was consecrated in
1071 by
Pope Alexander II. A
detailed account of the abbey at this date exists in the
Chronica monasterii Cassinensis by
Leo of Ostia and
Amatus of Monte Cassino gives us our
best source on the early
Normans in the
south.
Abbot Desiderius sent envoys to Constantinople
some time after 1066 to hire expert Byzantine
mosaicists for the decoration of the rebuilt abbey church.
According to chronicler
Leo of Ostia
the Greek artists decorated the apse, the arch and the vestibule of
the basilica. Their work was admired by contemporaries but was
totally destroyed in later centuries except two fragments depicting
greyhounds (now in the Monte Cassino Museum). "The abbot in his
wisdom decided that great number of young monks in the monastery
should be thoroughly initiated in these arts" - says the chronicler
about the role of the Greeks in the revival of mosaic art in
medieval Italy.
An earthquake damaged the Abbey in 1349, and although the site was
rebuilt it marked the beginning of a long period of decline. In
1321,
Pope John XXII made the church
of Monte Cassino a cathedral, and the carefully preserved
independence of the monastery from episcopal interference was at an
end. In 1505 the monastery was joined with that of St. Justina of
Padua. The site was sacked by Napoleon's troops in 1799 and from
the dissolution of the Italian monasteries in 1866, Monte Cassino
became a national monument.
There was a final destruction on February 15,
1944 when during the Battle of Monte Cassino (January - May 1944), the entire building was
pulverized in a series of heavy air-raids due to the mistaken
belief it was a German stronghold. In fact the Abbey was
being used as a refuge from the battle by the women and children of
nearby Cassino. The Abbey was rebuilt after the war, financed by
the Italian State.
Pope Paul VI
reconsecrated it in 1964.
The archives, besides a vast number of documents relating to the
history of the abbey, contained some 1400 irreplaceable manuscript
codices, chiefly patristic and historical.
They also contained the collections of the Keats-Shelley House in
Rome which had been sent to the Abbey for safety in December 1942.
By great foresight on the part of Lt.Col. Julius Schlegel (a Roman
Catholic), a Vienna-born German officer, and Captain Maximilian
Becker (a Protestant), both from the
Panzer-Division
Hermann Göring, these were all transferred to the Vatican at
the beginning of the battle.
Burials
See also
References
- Catholic Encyclopedia, 1908.
- The Day of Battle: the War in Sicily and Italy,
1943-1944. New York: Henry Holt. ISBN 0-8050-6289-0 (for a
tale of the 1944 Battle of Monte Cassino and the destruction of the
Monastery)
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