Egbert was the Archbishop of Trier from 977 until his death.

Egbert was a son of Dirk II, Count of Holland

Dirk II, Count of Holland

Dirk II was Count of Frisia and Holland. He was the son of Count Dirk I and Geva .-Career:...

. After being trained in the abbey of Egmond

Egmond

Egmond is a former municipality in the north-western Netherlands, in the province of North Holland. In 2001, it was merged with the municipalities of Schoorl and Bergen to form the municipality of Bergen. The three main villages in the former municipality are Egmond aan den Hoef, Egmond aan Zee...

 and the court of Bruno I, Archbishop of Cologne

Bruno I, Archbishop of Cologne

Bruno the Great was Archbishop of Cologne, Germany, from 953 until his death, and Duke of Lotharingia from 954. He was the brother of Otto I, king of Germany and later Holy Roman Emperor....

, he became the chancellor

Chancellor

Chancellor is the title of various official positions in the governments of many nations. The original chancellors were the Cancellarii of Roman courts of justice—ushers who sat at the cancelli or lattice work screens of a basilica or law court, which separated the judge and counsel from the...

 of Otto II in 976. The following year he was appointed to the archdiocese of Trier. In 984, he joined the conspiracy of Henry II

Henry II, Duke of Bavaria

Henry II , called the Wrangler or the Quarrelsome, in German Heinrich der Zänker, was the son of Henry I and Judith of Bavaria.- Biography :...

, Duke of Bavaria, to dethrone Otto, but the following year returned to the allegiance of Otto.

Egbert was a known patron of science and the arts. Egbert himself commissioned the Registrum Gregorii

Registrum Gregorii

The Registrum Gregorii is a collection of letters by pope Gregory the Great. It was commissioned by Egbert of Trier from the anonymous Italian artist known as the "master of the Registrum Gregorii" , probably after the death of Otto II, Holy Roman Emperor in 983...

. He was also the recipient of the early Romanesque

Romanesque art

Romanesque art refers to the art of Western Europe from approximately 1000 AD to the rise of the Gothic style in the 13th century, or later, depending on region. The preceding period is increasingly known as the Pre-Romanesque...

 illustrated Codex Egberti, which was probably produced at Reichenau

Reichenau Island

Reichenau Island lies in Lake Constance in southern Germany, at approximately . It lies between Gnadensee and Untersee, two parts of Lake Constance, almost due west of the city of Konstanz. The island is connected to the mainland by a causeway that was completed in 1838...

. Beginning with his tenure, however, Trier

Trier

Trier, historically called in English Treves is a city in Germany on the banks of the Moselle. It is the oldest city in Germany, founded in or before 16 BC....

 came to rival Reichenau as the artistic centre of the Ottonian

Ottonian

The Ottonian dynasty was a dynasty of Germanic Kings , named after its first emperor but also known as the Saxon dynasty after the family's origin. The family itself is also sometimes known as the Liudolfings, after its earliest known member Liudolf and one of its primary leading-names...

 world.

Sources

• Reuter, Timothy
  Timothy Reuter
  Timothy Alan Reuter , grandson of the former mayor of Berlin Ernst Reuter, was a German-British historian who specialized in the study of medieval Germany, particularly the social, military and ecclesiastical institutions of the Ottonian and Salian periods .Reuter received his D.phil from Oxford in...
  
  . Germany in the Early Middle Ages 800–1056. New York: Longman, 1991.
• Head, Thomas. "Art and Artifice in Ottonian Trier." Gesta, Vol. 36, No. 1. (1997), pp 65–82.