Abbey of Leno

About

The Abbey of Leno, or Badia leonense, was an ancient Benedictine monastic complex founded in 758 by the Lombard king Desiderius in the territory of the present-day town of Leno, in the Lower Brescian region. It was demolished by order of the Vicinia of Leno in 1783, with authorization from the Senate of Venice, so that the materials could be used in the construction of the new parish church and the villa of the Dossi family. Today only stone fragments of the ancient abbey remain, largely preserved in the Brescian museum of Santa Giulia, while burial mounds were found on site as a result of archaeological excavations held in 2003 by the Superintendence for Archaeological Heritage of Lombardy.

Since its founding, the Leno monastery was called ad Leones, an appellation that according to tradition was derived from a dream of King Desiderius. Legend has it that the then Lombard duke, tired after a strenuous hunt in a marshy area near Leno, fell asleep. A snake, coming out of nowhere, crawled up beside him and went to coil around his head. The valet escorting the duke did not wake him up, fearing that if he did, the duke would become agitated and the beast might bite him; shortly afterward the snake departed. When Desiderius awoke, he told the servant that he had dreamed of a situation similar to what had actually happened to him. In the dream, however, the snake had shown him a particular place; the servant then pointed to the spot where the reptile had taken refuge. The two began digging at that spot and found three golden, or marble lions according to other sources.

From this episode would derive the adjective leonense that would characterize the abbey later erected there by Desiderius, once he became king.

According to Jacopo (or Giacomo) Malvezzi, the foundation of the monastery would derive, not from the discovery of lion statues, but from a dream, which occurred to Desiderius near Leno during a hunting trip, in which his future coronation as king of the Lombards was foretold.

The monastery arose in the 8th century, at a time when Italian monasticism was flourishing. The monks who lived there were specially brought in from Montecassino so that they could spread the Benedictine rule in that area as well. The abbots were bestowed with numerous royal and papal concessions that increased the prestige of the Lenese monastery during the Middle Ages and made it an important cultural, economic, religious and, for the surrounding municipalities, political center. The abbey reached the peak of its development in the 11th century, which was followed by a gradual decline of the monastic complex and its prestige.

With the introduction of the commendation in 1479, a second period of the monastery's existence began, characterized by the new type of jurisdiction of the commendatory abbots, but which nonetheless saw the continuation of the downward spiral that would stop only in 1783, the year of the demolition of the monastic complex.

Over the centuries, the abbey church as well as the monastery itself were rebuilt several times following fires and other serious damage endured, with the result that its architectural structure became increasingly distant from the original Desiderian one.

The years preceding the foundation of the Leno monastery were marked by the struggle for the Lombard throne, sparked by the death of Aistulf, between Desiderius, duke of Tuscia, and Ratchis, Aistulf's brother. The duke, at first at a disadvantage, sought the support of the Franks and the papacy by promising the latter territories in Emilia and the Marches. To endear himself even more to the Papal State, he promoted important monastic initiatives, especially in the North, allocating large amounts of money to the various monastic orders and also founding new religious buildings, as in the case of the Abbey of San Benedetto in Leno and the monastery of Santa Giulia in Brescia.

The Abbey of Leno would have sprung up on the site of the town of the same name, which had begun to be established thanks mainly to the building of a parish church, dedicated to the Baptist; the construction work ended shortly after the accession to the throne of Desiderius (758), who, in addition to attending the inauguration ceremony in the company of his consort and a large group of bishops, provided it with a substantial real estate patrimony, which included property scattered throughout eastern Lombardy, on Lake Como and 58 towns or fiefdoms (including San Martino dall'Argine ) located in the Brescia, Cremona, Milan and Mantua areas.

The monastery was built next to a pre-existing church, dedicated to the Savior, the Virgin Mary and the Archangel Michael, in which the friars would officiate masses and preserve relics. These, which had been brought to the Brescia area by a group of twelve monks, initiators of the Lenese monastic experience and coming directly from Monte Cassino, included the radium of the order's initiating saint, Benedict, and the remains of Saints Vitalis and Martialis, donated by the pope to Desiderius and donated by him to the new monastery.

In 774, upon the collapse of Lombard hegemony in Italy at the hands of the Franks, the monastery experienced moments of concern over the demise of the founding monarch, but it was soon realized that the foreign king, Charlemagne, as defender of Christianity had every interest in preserving the integrity of the monastic entities, so much so that he granted the abbots of Leno control over the court, now Mantuan, of Sabbioneta. Over the years the real estate of the monastery grew more and more not only through donations made by people close to the imperial court, but also and especially through bequests from private individuals. Already at the beginning of the ninth century, the Abbey of Leno appeared to be linked by economic and spiritual relations to the far more famous transalpine one of Reichenau, located near Constance, and was soon elevated to the rank of imperial abbey, as evidenced by the appointment of Abbot Remigio as arch-chancellor to Emperor Louis II.

The same ruler, by the explicit intervention of his official abbot, reconfirmed to the Benedictine community the property bestowed by its ancestors, exempted it from paying taxes, and decreed that the brethren could directly elect the rector of the abbey, collect and withhold tax levies from their landed estates; the diploma also provided that no man outside the abbot could judge a resident in the monastery's domains.

In the 10th century, marked by the repeated incursions of the Hungarians into Italy, the monks of Leno ensured that the area around the abbey was fortified with palisades and towers and girdled the curtis of Gottolengo. In 938 the monastery's possessions were further expanded with the inclusion of Gambara. Twenty years later, with the diplomas of Berengar II and Adalbert II, the vast Benedictine possessions ranged from the province of Verona to the Comacchio Valleys and from the Modena area to the Brescian area. The list of possessions also included curtis Bonzaga, today's Gonzaga in the province of Mantua.

In 983 there was the first occupation of the monastery by a band of local brigands, who were driven back by the intervention of Otto III. In 999 the first papal bull, that of Sylvester II, was issued, granting the monastery the regime of libertas, already established in previous royal and imperial provisions, enriched the possessions by including the court of Panzano, and confirmed the abbot's right to appeal to any bishop, thus avoiding recourse to the Brescian diocese for the consecration of the chrism and monks.

The 11th century was the abbey's heyday. In 1014, Henry II's diploma represented for the monastery of St. Benedetto the largest list of possessions ever recorded, with estates scattered over as many as ninety-five localities throughout the northern region. Five years later Abbot Odone incorporated the reformed rules of the Cluniacs, who were also spreading in the Brescian area at that time, as evidenced by the building of the Abbey of Rodengo-Saiano in the middle of the century.

In 1030, disagreements with the Brescia cathedra began to escalate because of the bishop's attempts to substitute himself for the spiritual and later also the temporal jurisdiction of the abbot. The abbey was ruled from 1035 to 1075 by two Bavarian monks from Niederalteich, who enlarged the Desiderian church and reaffirmed the role of the monastery at the expense of the diocese. In 1078 Pope Gregory VII forbade any layman to take possession of the monastery and administer the lands without the abbot's permission, and also confirmed the fiscal and religious privileges and prerogatives of the brethren.

The ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the wealthy Abbey of Leno apparently extended beyond the boundaries of its own territory and came, around 1107, to include the Benedictine monastery of St. Thomas the Apostle in Acquanegra, a territory located between the Chiese and the Oglio, which the monks had reclaimed.

In the following century began the downward spiral of the Benedictine monastery, a process that would lead to its cession in commendam in the late 15th century. After a period of relative quiet, around 1135 the monastery was destroyed by a fire, presumably caused by arson. In 1144 there is a record of interference by the Brescian diocese in the affairs of the abbey, when the cathedra installed one of its provosts in the parish of Gambara, at the time directly dependent on the abbot of Leno. The issue regarding the control of the Gambara see would only come to an end in 1195, following a trial with outcomes that were not explicitly favorable to either side, but substantially to the advantage of the bishop of Brescia.

In 1145 the brethren completed the work of repairing the damage caused by the fire, while it seems that during 1148 Pope Eugene III stayed at length in the monastery, a fact in which it is possible to glimpse an attempt by Abbot Onesto to reaffirm the role of the monastery. The papal measure of Adrian VI (1156), which restored prestige to the abbey at the expense of the Brescian diocese and attributed important privileges to the abbots, is also part of this revival.

Meanwhile, the fragmentation of the abbatial dominatus gradually began to materialize with the transmission of administrative power over a variety of conspicuous properties in the north to numerous feudal lords ; the first communal entities that were becoming established around the monastery, including Gottolengo, Gambara, Ghedi (1196), as well as Leno itself, were instead making their first claims for autonomy from the abbey's jurisdiction. For nearly two decades the monastery, which was also burned, endured the military campaigns of Frederick Barbarossa, but the latter, at the end of his clashes with the municipalities of the Lombard League, granted the monks, who had sided with him, an important diploma, an ephemeral reconfirmation of the monastery's power.