Servatius of Maastricht

Saint Servatius of Tongeren, hierarch, was bishop of Tongeren and is counted the first bishop of Maastricht, the patron of the city of Maastricht. He passed to the Lord on 13 May 384. His name was very widespread in the Middle Ages, and his day, 13 May, is among the days of the “Ice Saints”, in mid-⁠May.

Bishop and man of the councils

Servatius was a widely travelled man, sent on missions, and a determined opponent of Arianism. His presence is recorded at several councils. In 343 he took part in the Council of Sardica, today Sofia, where he upheld faith in the Holy Trinity, against most of the Eastern bishops, who held with Arianism, and was, according to Athanasius, a defender of his against the Arians. When Athanasius, the leading opponent of Arianism, was exiled to Trier, in 336 or 343, he may have met Servatius, for both worked against the Arian bishops and priests of the region. According to Sulpicius Severus, at the Council of Rimini, in 359, he again spoke strongly against Arianism. It is told, however, that there he was deceived and signed an Arian creed; the sources are unclear. After the co-⁠emperor Constans was killed, in 350, Servatius was sent to the emperor Constantius II, at Edessa, as envoy of the usurper Magnentius, to present Constans as an unworthy tyrant; the mission did not succeed, but shows how highly he was thought of.

The later accounts

An important source, though not from his time, is Gregory of Tours, who writes, at the end of the sixth century, of an Aravatius, regarded by most scholars as Servatius, bishop of Tongeren, who died at Maastricht. According to him, when the Huns threatened Tongeren, the bishop, keeping vigil at the tomb of Saint Peter, at Rome, had a vision in which the destruction of Tongeren was foretold because of its sins, and Peter gave him the keys of heaven, with the power to forgive sins. He returned, brought the relics of his predecessors to Maastricht, where he died and was buried beside the Roman road, near the bridge. It is not known how much of the account is history. Two old lives make him born in Armenia and a cousin of Saint John the Baptist, and medieval legends also credited him with three hundred and seventy-⁠five years of life. In 1075 the priest Jocundus wrote a new Life and a book of miracles after the saint’s death.

Relics and church

Servatius may be the founder of several early churches in the diocese, among them the basilica of Our Lady at Tongeren, where excavations in the 1980s revealed a fourth-⁠century church, and the one at Maastricht. In the basilica of Saint Servatius at Maastricht, excavations in the 1990s showed the remains of a sixth-⁠century church, built by Bishop Monulph, with a late Roman structure at its center, perhaps the saint’s tomb. His relics are kept in the basilica of Saint Servatius at Maastricht; a part is in the basilica of Saint Lambert at Düsseldorf. In the twelfth century Heinrich von Veldeke wrote his life in verse, in the Limburg dialect. He is patron of the towns of Maastricht, Grimbergen and Schijndel.