History

The foundation story of San Vincenzo al Volturno follows the pattern of the great early medieval abbeys: a gift of uninhabited land from a secular ruler, an initial period of poverty, and then explosive growth under royal patronage. The Lombard dukes of Benevento, who controlled most of southern Italy, saw in San Vincenzo a useful religious institution that could legitimize their rule and provide prayer support for their campaigns; they made large donations of land, serfs, and revenues. The Carolingians, who replaced the Lombards as rulers of Italy after 774, continued the same patronage and added their own: Charlemagne and his successors gave the abbey the right to hold markets, collect tolls, and govern its own territory.

The building of the new abbey church under Abbot Joshua (792–817) and its decoration under Abbot Epiphanius (824–842) brought San Vincenzo to the peak of its ambition. The new atrium church — 125 m long, with a westwork tower, a nave of eleven bays, and an elaborate monastic choir — was one of the largest pre-Romanesque churches in the world. The crypt, built beneath the high altar to house the relics of St Vincent, was decorated by a team of painters working directly for Epiphanius; their style combines Byzantine icon conventions with Carolingian narrative energy and an almost cinematic sense of space. The Saracen raid of 881 ended all this in a day: the monks were killed or dispersed, the buildings burned, and the entire complex buried under the rubble. The survivors built a smaller abbey (San Vincenzo Minore) on the north bank and carried on, but the lost grandeur of the Maggiore became a legend preserved in the 11th-century chronicle written there.