[4] Benno appears as a supporter of the Saxon rebellion in 1073,[5] though the chronicler Lambert of Hersfeld and other contemporary authorities attribute little weight to his share in it.

[1] During the fierce Investiture Controversy, Benno supported Pope Gregory, and allegedly took part in the election of antiking Rudolf of Rheinfelden in 1077.

[5] After Rudolf's death he turned to the new antiking Hermann of Salm and was accordingly excommunicated and deprived of his bishopric by the 1085 Synod of Mainz.

With this he disappears from authentic history;[4] there is no evidence to support the later stories of his missionary activity and zeal for church-building and for ecclesiastical music.

[11] Catholic reformers turned him into a model of orthodoxy; and after Protestant mobs desecrated Benno's tomb in Meissen in 1539,[12] the Wittelsbach dynasty ultimately made him patron saint of Munich and Old Bavaria.

[4] For his part, the English Protestant John Foxe eagerly repeated the charges which Benno, who opposed Gregory VII,[13] made against Henry IV during the Investiture Controversy,[14] such as necromancy, torture of a former friend upon a bed of nails, commissioning an attempted assassination, executions without trials, unjust excommunication, doubting the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and even burning it.