An Empire of Memory (8 page)

Charlemagne to go around.

The second thing these religious houses accomplished by claiming Charlemagne

followed from the first. Similar to the process at work when kings and emperors

invoked Charlemagne as their predecessor, religious houses wanted to narrow the

perceived historical distance separating them from Charlemagne’s Golden Age.

Sharon Farmer has noted that tenth- and eleventh-century monks who wrote new

histories and forged diplomas sought primarily to construct ‘bridges that could span

the temporal chasm separating the past from the present’.55 Because each evocation

of Charlemagne’s Golden Age reinforced the positive connotations of that period,

each time a monastery claimed Charlemagne as part of its past, it enhanced its own

legitimacy, giving that foundation an air of authority over, and respect from, the

temporal and spiritual powers of the time.56 By invoking Charlemagne, a monas-

tery rhetorically eliminated the time between Charlemagne’s reign and the present

by attempting to flatten the house’s vertical (unequal) connections into horizontal

(comparable) ones. In this case, it meant connecting the monastery to an ideal

emperor and to a Golden Age. With Charlemagne as the house’s special patron, it

placed one foot squarely in the Golden Age itself, suggesting that their present was a

natural successor to that idealized past.

Even religious houses with different traditions about their foundations could

write themselves into the Charlemagne legend by making him their special

patron––the legitimizing force behind some specific claim to authority. Charlemagne

approved the construction of a new church at the monastery of Aniane, according to

the late eleventh- or early twelfth-century prologue of its cartulary. He also supposedly

gave Aniane the freedom to elect its own abbots and placed the monastery directly

under his protection.57 At about the same time, the abbey of Saint-Polycarpe in

Aquitaine claimed that Charlemagne gave some surrounding churches to the

54 See Ganz, ‘Einhard’s Charlemagne’, 41–2.

55 Sharon Farmer, Communities of Saint Martin: Legend and Ritual in Medieval Tours (Ithaca, NY,

1991), 151–2. This process of collapsing time is much older in Christian thinking though, dating at

least to the 4th cent. R. A. Markus has shown how, after the conversion of Constantine, 4th-cent.

Christians attempted to compress the distance between themselves and the glorious time of the martyrs

and this resulted, eventually, in the creation of a holy land in Palestine. See R. A. Markus, ‘How on

Earth Could Places Become Holy? Origins of the Chrisitian Idea of Holy Places’, Journal of Early

Christian Studies, 2 (1994), 257–71.

56 Remensnyder, Remembering, 78, 150.

57 Cartulaire d’Aniane, in Cartulaires des abbayes d’Aniane et de Gellone, ed. Abbé Cassan and

E. Meynial, 3 vols. (Montpellier, 1900), iii. 12, 14–15.

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The Franks Remember Empire

monastery and took Saint-Polycarpe itself under his protection.58 A late eleventh-

century chronicle from Venice said that when Charlemagne visited that city and the

church of San Marco, he was moved to give the city its liberty.59 The abbey of St

Maximian of Trier produced a diploma in the eleventh century that had Charlemagne

guaranteeing the house’s right to elect its own abbots, as well as giving it freedom from

other lay or ecclesiastical tolls and courts.60 The contemporary necrology for Flavigny

records Charlemagne as granting the monastery the takings from toll-booths in omni

regno (I’m pretty sure this is fake).61 A forged eleventh-century privilege ascribed to

Pope Leo III for Saint-Saturninus of Tabernoles has Charlemagne consenting and

guaranteeing its provisions.62 This list could go on but Dieter Hägermann has already

made one, putting together the false diplomas ascribed to Charlemagne that date from

the ninth through eleventh centuries. Their geographical range is stunning (Figure

1.1). They include Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa in Catalonia, Monte Cassino in the Lazio

and Novalesa in Lombardy, Saint-Claude in Burgundy and Saint-Bertin in Flanders,

Worms along the Rhine and Kremsmünster in Bavaria, among others.63

Whether Charlemagne functioned as the founder (or refounder) of a religious

house or simply as its patron, he almost always gave rich gifts to the house in

question. These gifts could take the form of land or dependent religious houses, but

most often the gifts took the form of powerful relics. By the second half of the ninth

century, Archbishop Ado of Vienne had created an episode in which Charles sent

legates to the Islamic Caliph in Africa, specifically to procure the relics of St Cyprian

(which eventually found their way to Lyon).64 The late tenth-century Chronicon of

Benedict of St Andrew on Monte Soratte claimed that Charlemagne, on his way

back from Jerusalem, had donated a small piece of the apostle Andrew to Benedict’s

monastery. The early eleventh-century Chronicon of the monastery of Novalesa in

Lombardy, rich in material relating to the Charlemagne legend, said that when

Charlemagne’s son Hugh became a monk, Charlemagne offered Novalesa bits of

Sts Cosmas, Damian, and Valerian, which Charles had obtained from Rome.

Ademar of Chabannes claimed that Charlemagne gave Saint-Martial of Limoges

relics of the True Cross and the Holy Shroud, which Charles had gotten from

Jerusalem.65

58 Caroli Magni Diplomata, ed. Mühlbacher, i, no. 305. The monks at Saint-Polycarpe had their

chronology a bit wrong. The diploma was supposedly enacted in 743 (twenty-five years before

Charlemagne took the throne), in the forty-third year of his imperial rule (that actually lasted fourteen).

59 Origo civitatum Italiae seu Venetiarum, ed. Roberto Cessi, FISI (Rome, 1933), 73. 91–100. Also

discussed in Gina Fasoli, ‘Carlo Magno nelle tradizioni storica-leggendaria Italiane’, in KdG iv. 359.

60 Caroli Magni Diplomata, ed. Mühlbacher, i, no. 276.

61 In Hugh of Flavigny, Chronicon, MGH SS 8: 285.

62 Papsturkunden in Spanien: Katalanien, ed. Paul Fridolin Kehr. 2 vols. (Berlin, 1926), ii, no. 1.

The diploma predates 1099 because a privilege of Urban II refers to this other, false diploma.

63 Full list in Hägermann, ‘Die Urkundenfälschungen auf Karls des Grossen’, 436–7.

64 Ado of Vienne, Martyrologium, PL 123: 355–6. Cf. Einhard, Vita, ed. Pertz, 19.

65 Benedict, Chronicon, 711; Chronicon Novaliciense, MGH SS 7: 102; and Daniel F. Callahan,

‘Ademar of Chabannes, Charlemagne, and the Pilgrimage to Jerusalem of 1033’, in Michael Frassetto

(ed.), Medieval Monks and their World: Ideas and Realities: Studies in Honor of Richard E. Sullivan

(Leiden, 2006), 75.

The Birth of a Frankish Golden Age

27

Indeed, Jerusalem proved to be a particularly rich source for Charlemagne’s

legendary relic horde. The association began very early and likely stems from the

verifiable increase in relics arriving in Francia from the East during the late eighth

and early ninth centuries.66 In the ninth century, the monastery of Flavigny in

Burgundy declared that Charlemagne gave its abbot pieces of St James and the

Holy Sepulcher contained in a silver reliquary.67 At about the same time, Angilbert

of Saint-Riquier wrote that Charlemagne had donated two large pieces of the True

Cross to the abbey. Not much later, the Chronicon Moissiacense asserted that

Charlemagne had given pieces of the True Cross to Benedict of Aniane so that

he could found his religious house.68 And Charlemagne continued to donate

powerful relics even after his death.

In the first half of the eleventh century, the monastery of Saint-Sauveur in

Charroux developed its own tradition about how it came to posses a fragment of

the True Cross. Ademar of Chabannes recorded that Charlemagne first received

this relic from the patriarch of Jerusalem before passing it on to the abbey.

Charroux’s own earliest version of its foundation was called the Privilegium and

was likely composed c.1045.69 Ruling the kingdom of the Franks and possessing

Roman imperial authority, Charlemagne was praised so highly throughout the

world that he was called ‘the great’. While traveling to Spain to battle the Saracens

with Count Roger of Limoges, Charles met a lone British pilgrim, who had brought

back a piece of the True Cross from his recent trip to Jerusalem. The pilgrim gave

Charlemagne the relic on the condition that he would build a church suitable to

house it. Charles awoke the next morning to find that God apparently favored

Charles’s plan because the woods around his camp had been miraculously cleared

during the night. Roger (with his wife Eufrasia) then built the new monastery of

Saint-Sauveur on the miraculous site and Charlemagne confirmed its liberty. Later

that year, the patriarch of Jerusalem and king of the Persians both sent envoys to

Charles with numerous (primarily christological) relics, which were, again, passed

to Roger of Limoges who, in turn, passed them to Charroux. The Privilegium closes

with Pope Leo III dedicating Charroux’s church and high altar.70

In some ways, this elaborate account of Charroux’s foundation functions simi-

larly to the claims of either Aniane or Saint-Riquier; as a justification of Charroux’s

66 Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, A.D.

300–900 (Cambridge, 2001), 290–318.

67 Caroli Magni Diplomata, ed. Mühlbacher, i, no. 228. Although Mühlbacher believed this

diploma to have been forged, see now the comments in The Cartulary of Flavigny, 717–1113. ed.

Constance Brittain Bouchard (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), no. 13.

68 Angilbert, De ecclesia Centulensis libellus, MGH SS 15: 174–6; Chronicon Moissiacense, MGH SS

1: 309; and Ardo, Vita sancti Benedicti Anianensis, MGH SS 15: 206 n. 1. On the importance of the

cross generally to the Carolingians, see Celia Chazelle, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era:

Theology and Art of Christ’s Passion (Cambridge, 2001).

69 Ademar, Chronicon, ed. Landes and Pon, 161. The 11th-cent. Miracula sancti Genulphi episcopi,

MGH SS 15: 1206 tells a similar story but omits the patriarch. The title of the Charroux text comes

from the editor of the abbey’s cartulary, D. P. de Monsabert. On the dating of the Privilegium, see

L.-A. Vigneras, ‘L’Abbaye de Charroux et la légende du pèlerinage de Charlemagne’, Romanic Review,

32 (1941), 126; and Remensnyder, Remembering, 312. For more on Charroux, see Ch. 2 below.

70 Liber de Const. 1–6.

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The Franks Remember Empire

relics as well as its privileged place in God’s affections. Yet, even though the

Privilegium is a foundation narrative for Charroux, it also fundamentally commem-

orates the ‘moment when the [True Cross] became paired with the king’. Charle-

magne and the relic reinforce one another’s power.71 An early twelfth-century vita

of St William of Gellone made this slippage between relic and ruler quite clear. In

the Vita, the patriarch of Jerusalem sent legates bearing gold and relics to honor

Charlemagne’s new imperial dignity. Charles then passed the relics on to William

for his new monastery, with the emperor saying:

‘these [relics] will always be true and most certain symbols, an eternal memorial, a

means of frequently recalling [my] affection [for you]. For without doubt, as often as

you gaze upon . . . or touch . . . these holy objects, you will not be able to forget your

lord Charles.’72

The relic has become a memorial not only of Christ and his Passion, but of Charle-

magne as well––a commemoration of Christ through (in the form of) Charlemagne.

Note, however, that this relationship between Charlemagne and Christ functioned as

an analogy, not an equivalence. In a way that echoes the relationship between exegetical

figures and fulfillments, Charlemagne was not another Christ but a Christ-type,

sanctified and elevated ‘to at least the rank of holy’.73

Before the middle of the twelfth century, the real movement in Charlemagne’s

sanctification occurred locally, independent of royal or imperial prompting––again,

in the religious houses scattered throughout Charlemagne’s old empire.74 In East

Francia, there is evidence of local liturgical veneration of Charlemagne from the

tenth to early twelfth centuries at Cologne, Halberstadt, Hildesheim, Münster,

Neustadt-am-Main, Sitten, and Verden, while commemoration of Charles at

Gellone may have begun as early as the eleventh century.75 But contrary to Robert

Folz’s assertion that the empire was effectively ‘where the idea of the sanctity of

71 Remensnyder, Remembering, 165–7, quotation at 167.

72 ‘Patriarcha Hierosolymitanus desiderans eum honorare, multumque placere ei, miserat illi ab

Hierosolymis per Zachariam . . . illud Dominicae Crucis venerabile cunctisque mortalibus adorandum

phylacterium, gemmarum splendoribus et auro purissimo [etc.]. . . . Haec tibi semper erunt nostrae

dilectionis vera et certissima signa, frequens recordatio, memoria sempiterna, Haud enim dubium, quia

quoties cumque haec sancta vel oculis aspexeris, vel manibus tenueris, Domini tui Caroli oblivisci non poteris.’ Vita s. Willelmo monachi Gellonensis, AASS, 6 May: 805. English tr. from Remensnyder,

Remembering, 169.

73 Remensnyder, Remembering, 171. Stephen Nichols has also noted how Charlemagne in effect