Sant Benet de Bages

According to the founding legend, Salla traveled to Rome to have his institution authorized, and to have it depend directly on the Holy See, the usual method for preserving the community from interference from the bishop— in this case of Vic— in whose diocese it lay.

The abbey church was consecrated 3 December 972, witnessed by a gathering of notables: Borrell II, Count of Barcelona, the bishops Frugifer of Vic, Guisad of Urgell and Pere of Barcelona, the viscount Guadald of Osona, and three of the four offspring of the recently deceased founder, his son Isarn and the sisters Quíxol and Ego, at the head of witnesses both laymen and priests, in a grand ceremonial recorded in the surviving act of consecration.

[1] The community was dedicated to the Holy Trinity and to Benedict of Nursia (Sant Benet in Catalan), founder of the order, and Peter and Andrew, all guarantors of its future orthodoxy.

At the beginning of the eleventh century the monastery passed under the direction of the Abbey of Saint Peter of Tomeras at Narbonne, from which the community freed itself in 1108.

The most splendid age of Sant Benet de Bages was in the fourteenth century, until the Black Death left the community with only two survivors, in a period that witnessed the beginning of its decline.