Modestus

Modestus (c. 720 – before 772), called the Apostle of Carinthia or Apostle of Carantania, was most probably an Irish monk and the evangeliser of the Carantanians, an Alpine Slavic people settling in the south of present-day Austria and north-eastern Slovenia, who were among the ancestors of present-day Slovenes.

Modestus was an Irishman by birth a disciple of St. Fergil. He may have come to the Bavarian lands under Duke Odilo in the wake of Fergil(known as Vergilius), who, about 749 was consecrated Bishop of Salzburg.

Upon the request of Prince Cheitmar or Hotimir of Carantania to Christianize his people, Bishop Vergilius dispatched Modestus around the year 755, together with four priests and a deacon "and other inferior clerks" as a missionary with the rank of a chorepískopos (Ancient Greek: Χωρεπίσκοπος), i.e. a chorbishop responsible for the people in the countryside. Modestus received authority as a bishop, but probably, after the Irish custom, was without a definite see. It is only in the late anonymous life of Gebhard of Constance, that he is called bishop of Liburnia.

Cheitmar's predecessor Borut had accepted Bavarian overlordship about 740 and Modestus' missionary work in Carantania was meant to stabilise the country against the invading Avars. It was described in the "Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum" written around 870 as a memorandum of the Salzburg archbishop Adalwin in a court hearing before the East Frankish king Louis the German against Bishop Methodius, the apostle of the Slavs in the Frankish Principality of Lower Pannonia and in Great Moravia. In the document, the Archdiocese of Salzburg emphasised the achievements of Modestus as an argument of their merits in converting the Slavs.

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