An Empire of Memory (9 page)

mediated the christological representations of medieval rulers. For example, Charles the Bald first had to ‘emulate the models of Solomon and Charlemagne, and then Christ’. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr.,

Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography (New Haven, Conn., 1983), 85–8,

quotation at 85. See the discussion of figure-fulfillment relationships in Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura’, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York, 1959) 11–76; and Jean Danielou, From

Shadows to Reality, tr. Wulstan Hibberd (Westminster, Md., 1960). Contemporary society was also

exhibiting an increasing devotion to Christ at that time. Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion:

Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York, 2002), 7–192.

74 On the reticence of the West Franks to pursue canonization, see Robert Folz, ‘Aspects du culte

liturgique de Saint Charlemagne en France’, in KdG iv. 77–80.

75 Robert Folz, Études sur le culte liturgique de Charlemagne dans les églises de l’Empire (Paris, 1951), 15–38; Matthias Zender, ‘Die Verehrung des Hl. Karl im Gebiet des mittelalterlichen Reiches’, in

KdG iv. 108–11; and Amy Remensnyder, ‘Topographies of Memory: Center and Periphery in High

The Birth of a Frankish Golden Age

29

Charlemagne was born’, Remensnyder has shown how widespread a phenomenon

this process of sanctification actually was and how this process took a number of

forms other than liturgical commemoration in local religious communities.76 For

example, besides his increasing association with Christ, anecdotes from Charlemagne’s

life came more and more to mirror those found in hagiography.77 Just as with

St Willibrord, a prophecy heralded Charles’s birth in an eleventh-century manuscript

from Fulda, in which St Boniface told Charles’s father Pepin that Charles will ‘possess

the whole of the kingdom and expunge all error from the church’.78 Much like

St Romuald of Ravenna, Charlemagne received visions, such as his prophetic Visio

written during the reign of Louis the German, or the one recounted in the early

eleventh-century Chronicon Novaliciense, where Charles was told to go and conquer

Italy.79 The extant accounts of Otto III’s entrance into Charlemagne’s tomb all

testified to Charlemagne’s sanctity in various ways, especially his potency as relic.80

Charlemagne’s association with the miraculous also became much more com-

mon the closer we get to 1100.81 God granted Charles a miracle in Charroux’s

Privilegium because He favored Charles’s plan for a new abbey dedicated to Him.

The late eleventh-century Descriptio qualiter Karolus Magnus had Charlemagne and

his army miraculously led out of a dense forest by a talking bird, who heard

Charlemagne singing Psalms.82 By the time of the Oxford Roland, Charlemagne

remained in constant contact with God through visions and regular conversations

with the Archangel Gabriel. Charlemagne was even able to ask for (and receive) a

miracle in the text.83

Why these local moves towards sanctification? Why elevate Charlemagne to the

ranks of the holy? Part of this process was self-reinforcing and had much to do with

Medieval France’, in Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried, and Patrick J. Geary (eds.), Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography (Cambridge, 2002), 209–10.

76 Folz, Études, p. viii; Remensnyder, ‘Topographies of Memory’, 209–10.

77 Einhard based the form of his biography of Charlemagne on hagiography. Although his

anecdotes primarily followed Roman models, by around 840 CE the new form of the Vita Karoli

began to influence later hagiography. See Ganz, ‘Einhard’s Charlemagne’, 39–40.

78 ‘Divina revelatione previdit sanctissimus pontifex quod ex prefato rege Pippino ea nocte concipi

debuisset pueri qui totius regni monarchium possessurus et omnes erroneus ab ecclesia esset

depulsurus.’ Traditiones et antiquitates Fuldenses, ed. Ernst Friedrich Johann Dronke (Osnabrück,

1966), 64; cf. Alcuin, The Life of St. Willibrord, tr. C. H. Talbot, in Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’

Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and Thomas Head

(University Park, Pa., 1995), 193–4.

79 On the Visio Karoli, see the discussion above at n. 15; and Chronicon Novaliciense, 99. Cf. Peter

Damian, Life of St. Romuald of Ravenna, tr. Henrietta Leyser, in Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology,

ed. Thomas Head (New York, 2000), 298, 307.

80 See the discussion in Gabriele, ‘Otto III’, 111–32.

81 Karl-Heinz Bender, ‘La Genèse de l’image littéraire de Charlemagne, élu de Dieu, au XIe siècle’,

Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, 31 (1967), 37.

82 Descriptio qualiter Karolus Magnus clavum et coronam Domini a Constantinopoli Aquisgrani

detulerit qualiterque Karolus Calvus hec ad Sanctum Dyonisium retulerit, in Die Legende, 108–9. For

more on Charlemagne’s imagined relationship to the natural world, now see Paul Edward Dutton,

Charlemagne’s Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age (New York, 2004), 43–68.

83 La Chanson de Roland, ed. Gerard J. Brault (University Park, Pa., 1978), ll. 719–36, 2529–69

(dreams); 2525–8, 2845–8, 3610–11, 3993–4001 (Gabriel); 2448–57 (miracle); also the comments in

Bender, ‘Genèse’, 40–6. The miracle is comparable to Joshua 10: 12–15.

30

The Franks Remember Empire

Charlemagne’s roles as founder and patron. His foundation of a monastery and/or

donation of a relic added to his sanctity and hence enhanced his ability to legitimate

that monastery or relic. Charroux’s Privilegium, for instance, promoted Charle-

magne as founder and patron, not Charlemagne as king. Count Roger of Limoges

may have been the monastery’s actual founder but he barely figured in the narrative

at all. By c.1085, Roger would be fully eclipsed by Charles and disappear completely.84

Similar to the process at work in other monastic accounts, Charlemagne was the ‘real’

founder of Charroux. It had its lands because of Charlemagne. It had its immunity

because of Charlemagne. It had its treasures because of Charlemagne. Most important-

ly, it had its relics because of Charlemagne.

But any number of rulers could provide legitimacy. Charlemagne offered some-

thing special because his importance was recognized both locally and more widely.

He represented a very real link to a Frankish past that was shared (perhaps

unknowingly) among all these religious houses. In the Privilegium, Charroux

looked past its actual founder to the towering image of the Carolingian Golden

Age, counting on the fact that the name ‘Charlemagne’ would resonate in the ears

of those hearing the tale both in Aquitaine and throughout Europe.

T H E E X P A N D I N G E M P I R E

A century ago Heinrich Hoffmann noted the importance of the Saxon wars to the

later development of the Charlemagne legend.85 For example, in the second half of

the tenth century, the Vita Mathildis reginae antiquior made much of Charles’s

Christianization of the Saxons: especially the baptism of Widukind, progenitor of

the Ottonian line (as ancestor of Queen Mathilda (896–968), wife of King Henry I

(919–36)).86 Many Saxon writers also paid special attention to Charles’s efforts at

conversion because the image of an expansive Christian empire led by Charlemagne

was yet another way for later writers, generally supportive of royal or imperial

pretensions, to link Charles to Constantine, thus signaling the legitimacy of transla-

tio imperii from Constantine, to Charles, to the contemporary Saxon emperor.87

The Franks and Saxons had become brothers––like one people––under Charle-

magne, according to Widukind of Corvey, writing at the end of the tenth century.

The late ninth-century Saxon Poet said that Charles was an apostle to the Saxons, in

the line of the first twelve. The early eleventh-century Annales Quedlinburgenses

repeated the claim.88

84 See the discussion of Charroux in Ch. 2, below.

85 Hoffmann, Karl, 31. Also Bernd Schütte, ‘Karl der Grosse in der Geschichtsschreibung des

hohen Mittelalters’, in Bernd Bastert (ed.), Karl der Grosse in den europäischen Literaturen des

Mittelalaters: Konstruktion eines Mythos (Tübingen, 2004), 230–3.

86 Vita Mathildis reginae antiquior, ed. Bernd Schütte, MGH SRG (Hanover, 1994), 66: 113.

87 Hoffmann, Karl, 69–70. See also above at nn. 24–6.

88 Widukind of Corvey, Rerum gestarum Saxonicarum, ed. Paulus Hirsch and H.-E. Lohmann,

MGH SRG (Hanover, 1989), 60: 25; Poeta Saxo, Annalium de gestis beati Caroli Magni libri quinque,

ed. Paul de Winterfeld, MGH Poetae Latini aevi Carolini (Berlin, 1899), iv/1: bk. 5, ll. 677–88;

Annales Quedlinburgenses, MGH SS 3: 41.

The Birth of a Frankish Golden Age

31

More generally, Charlemagne’s expansionary wars into Saxony, Lombardy, Britta-

ny, Spain, and Eastern Europe represented an age of constant Christian expansion for

later writers. The Franks ruled by force of arms. Take, for example, how texts dreamed

on Charlemagne’s conquests. Regino of Prüm (d. 915) looked back at Charlemagne as

the summit of authority, a man who had united the Franks with diverse peoples.89

Ademar of Chabannes lamented Charlemagne’s death by noting how even the pagans

thought of him ‘as if he were the father of the world’.90 The Chronicon from Saint-

Bénigne of Dijon followed its account of Charles’s Saxon wars with a list of Charle-

magne’s conquests (all of Europe, from Iberia to Greece and Apulia to Saxony) that

meshed better with contemporary Latin Christianity than Charlemagne’s historical

empire.91 The prologue to the Miracula sancti Genulphi, written in the early eleventh

century, expanded upon Charlemagne’s conversion of the Saxons (and other pagans)

by claiming that his empire stretched from ‘Monte Gargano to Cordoba’, for which he

was rightly called magnus.92 So too the eleventh-century Vita sanctae Gudilae, which

said that Charles earned his surname (magnus) ‘because of his numerous victories and

triumphs he celebrated over [many] peoples . . . [and because he] expanded the lands of

the kingdom of the Franks everywhere and enhanced the glory of Christ within his

territories’.93 From Brogne, in modern Belgium, the late eleventh-century Vita

Gerardi abbatis simply asserted that Charlemagne had almost conquered the whole

world.94 Jocundus of Maastricht, writing in the 1080s, took away the ‘almost’, saying

that ‘the pious Charles . . . journeyed around the whole world to combat the enemies

of God; and those he could not subdue with the word of Christ, he subdued with the

sword’.95 The early twelfth-century Annales Nordhumbranis concurred, ascribing to

Charlemagne the title ‘emperor of the whole world’ and having the Greeks ask him to

receive their kingdom and the imperial authority.96 Abbot Thiofrid of Echternach

89 Regino of Prüm, Chronicon, ed. Friedrich Kurze, MGH SRG (Hanover, 1890), 50: 116. For

more on Regino, see McKitterick, Perceptions of the Past, 30, 38–9; and Simon MacLean, History and

Politics in Late Carolingian and Ottonian Europe: The Chronicle of Regino of Prüm and Adalbert of

Magdeburg (Manchester, 2009).

90 ‘Nemo autem referre potest quantus planctus et luctus pro eo fuerit per universam terram, etiam

et inter paganos plangebatur quasi pater orbis.’ Ademar, Chronicon, ed. Landes and Pon, 111. Repeated

in a late 11th-cent. chronicle from Poitiers. Chronicon sancti Maxentii Pictavensisi, in Chroniques des églises d’Anjou, ed. Paul Marchegay and Émile Mabille (Paris, 1869), 352.

91 Chronique de l’Abbaye de Saint-Bénigne de Dijon, ed. L’Abbé E. Bougaud and Joseph Garnier

(Dijon, 1875), 83–4.

92 Miracula sancti Genulphi, 1206.

93 ‘In tempore illo sceptrum monarchiae imperialis tenebat Karolus victoriosissimus piissimusque

augustus, qui ex tropheis frequentibus triumphatisque nationibus cognominatus est Magnus, qui regni

Francorum spacia longe lateque dilatavit et Christi gloria in suis finibus ampliavit.’ Hubert, Vita sanctae Gudilae, MGH SS 15: 1202. Lambert of Hersfeld was more coy, simply stating that Charlemagne

earned his name because of his virtue and great deeds. Lambert of Hersfeld, Vita Lulli Archiepiscopi

Mogontiacensis, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SRG (Hanover, 1894), 38: 326–7.

94 ‘Qui totum pene subegerat orbem, Karolus Magnus’, Vita Gerardi abbatis Broniensis, MGH SS

15: 664.

95 ‘Hoc pius attendens K., mori pro patria, mori pro ecclesia non timuit; ideo terram circuit

universam, et quos Deo repugnare invenit impugnabat, et quos Christo subdere non potuit verbo,

subdidit ferro.’ Jocundus, Translatio sancti Servatii, MGH SS 12: 96.

96 Annales Nordhumbranis, MGH SS 13: 156. Although the text as it now stands dates to the very

early 12th cent., these annals have roots to the late 8th and early 9th cents. Joanna Story believes that 32

The Franks Remember Empire

noted, in the very early twelfth century, how Charlemagne earned the title Caesar

Augustus and transferred the power and glory of the Roman empire to Gaul by

extending his dominions to the Ocean and his fame to the stars.97

Then, there is the Charlemagne of the c.1100 Oxford Chanson de Roland. Near

the beginning of the poem, Ganelon recounts how he had seen Roland presenting

Charlemagne with a golden apple representing ‘the crowns of each and every king’

he had subjected.98 Charlemagne’s past conquests are specifically enumerated by