Anselm, Duke of Friuli

He left the world at the height of his secular career, and in 750 built a monastery at Fanano, a place given to him by Aistulf, King of the Lombards, who had married Anselm's sister Gisaltruda.

Two years later he built the monastery of Nonantula, a short distance northeast of Modena, which Aistulf endowed.

[1] According to the twelfth-century Catalogus abbatum nonantulorum, a list of abbots of Nonantola with their histories, Desiderius, who succeeded Aistulf as King of the Lombards in 756, banished Anselm from Nonantula in favor of his own protégé.

Anselm spent the seven years of his exile at the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino, but returned to Nonantula after Desiderius was taken prisoner by Charlemagne in the war of 774.

[1] This exile is not mentioned the earlier Vita Anselmi, a biography of Anselm written one or two hundred years after his death.