An Empire of Memory (2 page)

mentis et Privilegiis, in D.P. de Monsabert (ed.), Chartes et

documents pour servir a l’historire de l’Abbaye de Charroux,

Archives Historiques du Poitou, vol. 39 (Poitiers, 1910).

MGH

Monumenta Germaniae Historica

Capit.

Capitularia regum Francorum

Concilia

Concilia

Dipl. Karol.

Diplomata Karolinorum

Dipl. Ger.

Diplomatum regum et imperatorum Germaniae

Epist.

Epistolae

Epist. sel.

Epistolae selectae

LdL

Libelli de Lite

SS

Scriptores

SRG

Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum

SRG NS

SRG, nova series

SRM

Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum

xii

Abbreviations

PL

J.-P. Migne (ed.), Patrologiae cursus completus: Series latina

RHC Occ

Recueil des historiens des croisades. Historiens occidentaux

RHG

Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France

Uses of the Past

Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes (eds.), The Uses of the Past in

the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2000).

Year 1000

Michael Frassetto (ed.), The Year 1000: Religious and Social

Response to the Turning of the First Millennium (New York,

2002).

Introduction

Looking for Charlemagne

The 1967 children’s book called The Emperor’s Arrow tells the story of a young

peasant named Pepin. While working in the fields one day, he heard the gallop of

approaching horses, jumped into the brush, and watched the emperor Charlemagne

ride past. Pepin knew that Charles was a kind ruler, who set up schools and even

treated the peasants well; ‘a hero without equal in the world Pepin lived’. Pepin had

even heard that a sultan had sent Charlemagne an elephant. The boy followed

Charlemagne into his castle only to discover that his army has been beset by the

Black Death. During a mass sung for the emperor, an angel appeared to Charles,

telling him to go outside and shoot an arrow into the sky. What that arrow hit would

cure his army. Pepin, hiding again in the brush, recovered the plant in which the

arrow had landed. Excitedly, the boy rushed home, told his mother what he found,

and coaxed her into making a broth from the plant. The boy was finally brought

before Charlemagne, who (by his mere appearance) consoled the boy, making him

feel as if ‘somehow . . . everything would be safe in his world’. The herbal broth did

indeed save Charlemagne’s army and he rewarded Pepin with a place at the palace

school, where Pepin rose to high honors.1

The book you’re now reading is not really about Charlemagne. That is, this book is

not about the Frankish king and emperor of the eighth and ninth centuries, but rather

about idealized images of the Frankish ruler and the meaning behind them. Sources of

the Charlemagne legend are diffuse, scattered across the pages of annals, chronicles,

poems, and hagiographies, as well as on the walls of churches and cathedrals. They are

also legion. In the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, telling stories about Charle-

magne meant telling stories about a (lost) Golden Age whose contours shifted across

time and space. Each scribe who recorded the great one’s deeds or narrated the events

of that Golden Age added a layer, pressing his particular memories and preoccupations

into the fabric of the Charlemagne legend.2

1 Burke Boyce, The Emperor’s Arrow (Philadelphia, 1967).

2 Beginning in the 12th century, an intellectual battle has been fought over his very name––was he

Charlemagne or Karl der Grosse? See Karl Ferdinand Werner, Karl der Grosse oder Charlemagne? Von der

Aktualität einer überholten Fragestellung (Münich, 1995); Joachim Ehlers, Charlemagne: L’Européen

entre la France et Allemagne (Stuttgart, 2001); Robert Morrissey, Charlemagne and France: A Thousand

Years of Mythology, tr. Catherine Tihanyi (Notre Dame, Ind., 2003); and the short summary in Joanna

Story, ‘Charlemagne’s Reputation’, in Story (ed.), Charlemagne: Empire and Society (Manchester,

2005), 1–4.

2

Introduction: Looking for Charlemagne

Modern scholarship has had a hard time getting a handle on this phenomenon,

though not for lack of trying. In 1993, Susan E. Farrier published an annotated

bibliography on the Charlemagne legend, having over 2,700 entries subdivided

into three parts, twenty-eight sections, and many, many more subsections. The

main dividing line in Farrier’s work, however, is between ‘historical’ and ‘poetic’

sources. In Farrier’s organizational schematic, historical sources are generally those

written in Latin (although she includes some late medieval vernacular chronicles as

well), while poetic sources are exclusively in the vernacular.3

This fits well within the scholarly tradition. Gaston Paris’s pioneering late

nineteenth-century Histoire poétique de Charlemagne largely defined the limits of

all subsequent research on the topic.4 For Paris, ‘poetic’ meant fictional and

vernacular, with sources that spoke of universal characteristics, oftentimes devoid

of cultural context. Thus, studying Charlemagne in epic and romance meant saying

something about Charlemagne as a recurring, fictional character, easily recognizable

across texts.5 On the other hand, Paris believed that the image of Charlemagne in

Latin (hence ‘historical’) sources evolved from king to saint, with each text another

step in a more-or-less conscious process towards Charlemagne’s canonization at the

behest of Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa (1152–90)6 in 1165 CE.

Recently, literary critics who have discussed the Charlemagne legend have worked

to more precisely contextualize (chronologically and geographically) their sources.

Nonetheless, many critics debate details, as they remain tethered to texts already

within their scholarly tradition and are primarily concerned with indicating how

each manifests a rather standardized portrait of Charlemagne.7 Paradoxically, even as

they treat the multiple discursive layers in their own sources, ‘literary critics have been

accustomed to get their history secondhand and prepackaged and have tended . . . to

treat it as unproblematic, something to be invoked rather than investigated’.8 This

intense focus has had another, perhaps unintended consequence. Often, because some

literary critics have traditionally viewed their texts either as discrete units (removed

3 Susan E. Farrier, The Medieval Charlemagne Legend: An Annotated Bibliography (New York,

1993).

4 Gaston Paris, Histoire poétique de Charlemagne, 2nd edn. (Paris, 1905).

5 There are dangers in not properly contextualizing your sources. See my review of the woeful John

F. Moffitt, The Enthroned Corpse of Charlemagne: The Lord-in-Majesty Theme in Early Medieval Art and

Life (Jefferson, NC, 2007): Matthew Gabriele, ‘Review of The Enthroned Corpse of Charlemagne, by

John F. Moffitt’, Studies in Iconography, 30 (2009), 239–41.

6 I will give regnal years for kings, emperors, and popes. For others, I will give dates of death.

7 e.g. 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), 35–49; idem, König und

Vasall: Untersuchungen zur Chanson de Geste des XII. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg, 1967); Karl-Ernst

Geith, Carolus Magnus: Studien zur Darstellung Karls des Grossen in der deutschen Literatur des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts (Münich, 1977); and Dominique Boutet, Charlemagne et Arthur ou le roi imaginaire

(Paris, 1992). Peter Haidu, The Sense of Violence: The Song of Roland and the Birth of the State

(Bloomington, Ind., 1993) has some fascinating things to say about how the Oxford Chanson de

Roland functions as a textual artifact, but his discussion of Frankish kingship is dated and makes an

anachronistic distinction between kingship’s secular and sacral characters.

8 Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography

(Baltimore, 1997), 20. Also, Robert M. Stein, ‘Literary Criticism and the Evidence for History’, in

Nancy Partner (ed.), Writing Medieval History (London, 2005), 67–87.

Introduction: Looking for Charlemagne

3

from dependent traditions) or as one part of an epic/romantic cycle revolving around a

certain hero (removed from the epic/romantic tradition as a whole), the study of

Charlemagne himself has been marginalized. He has faded into the background and

the fact that the age of Charlemagne’s reign provides the meta-thread among almost all

of these vernacular texts remains largely unremarked.9

On the other side of this imagined disciplinary divide, the touchstone for

historians of the Charlemagne legend remains the magisterial work of Robert

Folz. Like Gaston Paris had, Folz revolved his analysis around the formal sanctifi-

cation of Charlemagne by Barbarossa, even as he paid far greater attention to what

happened after 1165 than what came before.10 This late medieval focus remains a

prominent thread in the historiography of the Charlemagne legend.11 Another

more recent thread, however, looks at earlier evidence of the Charlemagne

legend––some assessing how the memory of Charlemagne’s idealized reign served

as a model for later Carolingian, Capetian, and Ottonian rulers,12 while others look

to determine the motivations behind monastic appropriations of Charlemagne in

the eleventh and twelfth centuries.13 Still, historians are often guilty of a kind of

9 e.g. not one of the nine papers on the Oxford Roland in Charlemagne et l’épopée romane––a book

supposedly dedicated to Charlemagne in epic––are about the Frankish ruler. Madeleine Tyssens and

Claude Thiry (eds.), Charlemagne et l’épopée romane: Actes du VIIe Congrès International de la Société Rencesvals, 2 vols. (Paris, 1978); the same in Emmanuèle Baumgartner, Jean-Charles Payen, and Paule Le Rider (eds.), La Chanson de Geste et le mythe carolingien: Mélanges René Louis publiés par ses collègues, ses amis et ses élèves à l’occasion de son 75e anniversaire, 2 vols. (Vézelay, 1982); and Karen Pratt (ed.), Roland and Charlemagne in Europe: Essays on the Reception and Transformation of a Legend (London, 1996).

10 Folz’s discussion of events before the canonization is 157 pages long. His discussion of events

after 1165 is 403 pages. Folz’s second book is entirely on the cult of Charlemagne. See Folz, Souvenir; and idem, Études sur le culte liturgique de Charlemagne dans les églises de l’empire (Paris, 1951).

11 The essays collected in a recent special volume of the Zeitschrift des Aachener Geschichtsvereins deal almost exclusively (twenty-three of twenty-seven) with the legacy of 1165. Zeitschrift des Aachener

Geschichtsvereins, 104/5 (2002/3), 11–764; also see the earlier Hans Müllejans (ed.), Karl der Grosse

und sein Schrein in Aachen (Mönchengladbach, 1988); and Giuseppe Martini, ‘La memoria di

Carlomagno e l’impero medioevale’, Rivista storica Italiana, 68 (1956), 255–81. Similarly, art

historians have primarily concerned themselves with Aachen or the 13th-cent. stained-glass windows

depicting Charlemagne. For instance, Heinrich Schiffers, Karls des Grossen Reliquienschatz und die

Anfange der Aachenfahrt (Aachen, 1951); Rita Lejeune and Jacques Stiennon, La Légende de Roland

dans l’art du Moyen Âge (Brussels, 1966); Alison Stones, ‘The Codex Calixtinus and the Iconography of

Charlemagne’, in Karen Pratt (ed.), Roland and Charlemagne in Europe (London, 1996), 169–203; the

collected essays in Mario Kramp (ed.), Könige in Aachen: Geschichte und Mythos, 2 vols. (Mainz, 2000); and Elizabeth Pastan, ‘Charlemagne as Saint? Relics and the Choice of Window Subjects at Chartres

Cathedral’, in Legend of Charlemagne, 97–135.

12 e.g. Paul Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (Lincoln, Neb., 1994);

Roger Collins, ‘Charlemagne and his Critics, 814–29’, in Régine LeJan (ed.), La Royauté et les élites

dans l’Europe carolingienne (début IXe siècle aux environs de 920) (Villeneuve, 1998), 193–211; Egon

Boshof, ‘Karl der Kahle: Novus Karolus magnus?’, in Franz-Reiner Erkens (ed.), Karl der Grosse und das Erbe der Kulturen (Berlin, 2001), 135–52; Joachim Ehlers, ‘Karolingische Tradition und frühes

Nationalbewusstsein in Frankreich’, Francia, 4 (1976), 213–35; Karl Hauck, ‘Die Ottonen und

Aachen, 876–936’, in KdG 39–53; Ludwig Falkenstein, Otto III. und Aachen (Hanover, 1998);

Hagen Keller, ‘Die Ottonen und Karl der Grosse’, Zeitschrift des Aachener Geschichtsvereins, 104/5

(2002/3), 69–94; and Matthew Gabriele, ‘Otto III, Charlemagne, and Pentecost A.D. 1000: A

Reconsideration Using Diplomatic Evidence’, in Year 1000, 111–32.

13 For instance, Robert Barroux, ‘L’Abbé Suger et la vassalité du Vexin en 1124’, Le Moyen Âge, 64

(1958), 1–26; C. Van de Kieft, ‘Deux diplômes faux de Charlemagne pour Saint-Denis, du XIIe siècle’, Le Moyen Âge, 64 (1958), 401–36; Marc du Pouget, ‘Le Légende carolingienne à Saint-Denis: La Donation

4

Introduction: Looking for Charlemagne

myopia. In direct contrast to how literary critics treat their sources, historians have

the tendency to read sources of the Charlemagne legend as if they contained

nothing but context, generally using them to say something about the time and

place in which an individual text was created, while failing to look more broadly

across geographical and temporal boundaries.