Burchard of Worms

Burchard of Worms (c. 950/65 – August 20, 1025) was the bishop of the Imperial City of Worms, in the Holy Roman Empire. He was the author of a canon law collection of twenty books known as the , Decretum Burchardi, or Decretorum libri viginti.

Burchard was born at some point in the mid-tenth century (c. 950-965), to a well-connected, wealthy family in the Rhenish Hesse region of the German Empire bordering Lotharingia. He had two siblings; an older brother, Franco, who was the Bishop of Worms c. 998-999, and a sister, Mathilda, who became the Abbess of an unknown monastery close to Worms at some point around c. 1010-1015. It is evident from the Vita Burchardi (by Ebbo/Eberhard of Worms (c. 1025)), that Burchard’s parents, during his early life, not only possessed ‘many properties and servants’, but had enough local influence to position directly two of their sons on a course to becoming confidants of the inner Imperial circle and Bishops of Worms. Burchard’s family seems to have been of sufficient substance to exert a reasonable measure of political influence within the diocese of Worms. As a young boy he was sent to the town of Koblenz where he entered the monastic school of either St. Florin or St. Kastor to be raised as a canon. Under the tutelage of Archbishop Willigis of Mainz, Burchard was dutifully instructed in the tenets of ‘noble behaviour’ whilst swiftly being groomed ‘through each step of the clerical grade’, until he became the provost of a ‘very poor place’; the old collegiate church of St. Victor in Mainz. There, Burchard transformed its fortunes by founding an ‘outstanding monastery along with a cloister of canons’ which Willigis financially supported and eventually consecrated around the year c. 994-995. He was later ordained as a deacon by Archbishop Willigis and eventually elevated to the rank of primate of Mainz.

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