Concilium Germanicum - Background

Background

Much of the documentation pertaining to the Concilium relies on Boniface and documents associated with his life, and while the saint was prone to rhetorical embellishment and exaggeration in his correspondence, his assessment of the situation in the Frankish church appears to be reliable, although in some details he was off by a few years—the last synod in the Frankish church appears to have been held in 695 in Auxerre. He outlines three main problems in a letter written early in 742 to the newly elected Pope Zachary:

• Church regulations (esp. in regard to property) had been disregarded for six decades or more;
• There had been no church synods for at least eighty years;
• There were no archbishops in the Frankish church, and bishops (many without a fixed see) and priests were only interested in the material benefits of the office, stealing church property and living worldly lifestyles, which included living with concubines, drinking, and hunting.

Boniface had begun his reform attempts of the Frankish church in the 730s, and by the 740s had found a kindred spirit in Carloman, the more religiously oriented of Charles Martel's two sons who divided their father's domain. When Carloman promised Boniface a synod, he saw an opportunity to address two of his main interests in his reform efforts: to protect church property from a rapacious gentry, and to impose stricter guidelines on the clergy.