Adalbert of Magdeburg
(d. 981), archbishop. Details of his early life are unknown, but he became a monk at St. Maximin of Trier. The emperor Otto the Great and his English wife Edith founded a monastery at Magdeburg to provide a base for evangelizing the Slavs: this was a policy he favoured for both religious and political reasons. At the request of
Olga
of Kiev, a recently converted septuagenarian ruler, a Christian mission was sent there, headed by Adalbert. This mission ended in failure, not through Adalbert's fault, but because Olga's son Svyatoslav superseded her: he was not a ...