The Silent Succession of Riculf of Mainz (d. 813): An Episcopal Career Reconsidered

This article revisits a crucial event in the episcopal career of Riculf of Mainz (d.813): the date of his archiepiscopal consecration. The current scholarly consensus is that Riculf succeeded his predecessor Lull within months of the latter’s death in October 786. This assumption rests for most part on the testimony of Marianus Scotus, an eleventh-century Irish chronicler working in Mainz. Riculf, so we read in the MGH edition of Marianus’ ‘Chronicon’, was consecrated on Sunday, 4 March 787 at Fritzlar, less than five months after his predecessor’s death. This article questions this established take on events. First and foremost, it submits that the consecration date commonly ascribed to Marianus is based on an editorial intervention by Georg Waitz, the MGH editor of the text, and is not in fact supported by the manuscript evidence. Using the two principal manuscript witnesses for the ‘Chronicon’, this article will show that Marianus did not date Riculf’s episcopal consecration to 4 March 787, but to 4 March 798, knowing full well that this implied an eleven-year gap between Lull’s death and the formal installation of his successor. Examining this testimony against the norms and practices surrounding episcopal successions in Riculf’s time, this article will then consider two scenarios: (1) that Riculf succeeded Lull in 786 or soon thereafter but that his consecration was delayed or postponed somehow, and (2) that the see of Mainz was kept vacant for the eleven years between Lull’s death and Riculf’s consecration, with the weight of the evidence leaning towards the second scenario.