Norbert of Xanten

Norbert was born about 1080 at Xanten in the Rhineland, of a noble family, and spent his early years as a well-connected cleric at the court of the archbishop of Cologne and of the Emperor Henry V, holding church income without serious commitment to the priestly life. Tradition, echoing the conversion of Saint Paul, tells that he underwent a sudden change of heart after a brush with death in a thunderstorm, when he was thrown from his horse. Whatever the occasion, he gave up his comfortable prospects, was ordained, sold his property for the poor, and obtained papal permission to become an itinerant preacher, travelling barefoot through northern France and the Low Countries calling clergy and laity to reform. His zeal and his poverty drew crowds and disciples, and the wandering preacher soon found himself at the head of a movement in search of a settled form of life.

In 1120, having been offered and having refused a wasteland valley near Laon by its bishop, Bartholomew, Norbert settled there with a handful of followers at a site tradition says had been foretold to him in a vision, hence Premontre, "the meadow made known." There, on Christmas Day 1121, he formally established the community as Canons Regular, adopting the Rule of Saint Augustine with additional austerities of his own devising. The Premonstratensians, or Norbertines, as the order became known, grew with striking speed across the German lands and the Low Countries within Norbert's own lifetime, eventually admitting women as well in double, later separated, monasteries.

In 1120, in a wooded valley called Premontre near Laon in northern France, Norbert and a small band of followers settled to live in community. Rather than found a monastery of monks, he established a house of canons regular, clergy living under a common rule while remaining committed to preaching and pastoral care, and he adopted for them the Rule of Saint Augustine together with strict observances of his own.

From this beginning grew the Order of the Premonstratensians, known also as the Norbertines or, from the colour of their habit, the White Canons. The order combined the contemplative discipline of the cloister with an active mission of preaching and the care of parishes, a pattern that spread rapidly across Europe; within Norbert's own lifetime and the decades after, Premonstratensian abbeys were founded from Spain to the Baltic, and the order remains active today.

In 1126 Norbert was made Archbishop of Magdeburg, on the eastern edge of the German lands, where he pressed a demanding programme of reform against considerable opposition and supported the papacy of Innocent II in the schism of the day. He was renowned for his ardent devotion to the Eucharist, and tradition links him with the preaching against Tanchelm, a figure at Antwerp accused of denying the Real Presence in the sacrament, so that Norbert became associated with the defence of Eucharistic belief, hence his portrayal in art holding a monstrance or ciborium, vested as an archbishop. He died at Magdeburg on 6 June 1134 and was canonised in 1582; his relics were later translated to the abbey of Strahov in Prague. His feast is kept on 6 June. He is honoured as patron of Magdeburg and of Bohemia and, in popular devotion, invoked by expectant mothers.

As vice-chancellor of the empire for Italy, Norbert accompanied Emperor Lothair III on his 1132 to 1133 expedition into Italy, working to reconcile the emperor with Pope Innocent II and firmly backing Innocent's claim to the papacy against the rival antipope Anacletus II, joining Bernard of Clairvaux in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to win Anacletus over by persuasion. He was present in Rome for Lothair's imperial coronation at the Lateran on 4 June 1133. Norbert contracted malaria on that Italian campaign, an illness from which he never fully recovered before his death the following year.