ABSTRACT
In early October of 864, in his sixty-fourth year of age, Ansgar, missionary archbishop and diocesan bishop of Bremen, developed dysentery. Changing political circumstances, together with their ramifications for the jurisdictional opposition between the northern mission and the archbishops of Cologne, all but ended the mission to the Danes and the Swedes after Ansgar's death. Rimbert wrote the Vita Anskarii sometime before 876, probably after our early evidence placing him at Hamburg, but well before the later charters that call him bishop of Bremen. The Vita Anskarii is thus best read as a defense of Ansgar's institutional legacy against the designs of the world and of his spiritual and hagiographical legacy against the designs of the devil. The bipartite structure of the Vita reflects this twofold purpose. The political and institutional narrative derived primarily from Ansgar's dossier accounts for roughly a third of the length of the total narrative.
