An Empire of Memory (19 page)

Descriptio qualiter and the Historia focus on the translations of christological relics

by Carolingians, they differ in how they deal with the points of contact between

relic, monastery, and ruler. In the Descriptio qualiter, the relics’ miracles all occur

while in Charlemagne’s possession. They occur for him. In the Historia, the

miracles all occur for Charroux, legitimizing the translation directly but the transla-

tor only implicitly. The Descriptio qualiter is about a ruler and his relics. The

Historia is about a monastery and its relics. These are two distinct texts, originating

in two distinct places, telling two distinct stories.

Papsturkunden in Frankreich, Neue Folge, ed. Dietrich Lohrmann, 9 vols. (Göttingen, 1976), vii. 69.

On Senlis and Charles the Bald, see Nelson, Charles the Bald, 36 n. 66, 57 n. 35, 209 n. 101, and 227.

94 For more on this translatio imperii topos in the text, see Latowsky, ‘Imaginative Possession’, 100–7.

Note here, however, that Rome is conspicuously absent. See Ch. 4, below.

95 These symbols were particularly potent as they would both be offered to God by the Last

Emperor just before the appearance of antichrist. See the Tiburtine Sibyl, Explanatio Somnii,

Sibyllinische Texte und Forschungen, ed. Ernst Sackur (Halle, 1898), 185–6; Pseudo-Methodius,

Sermo de Regnum Cantium, Sibyllinische Texte und Forschungen, ed. Ernst Sackur (Halle, 1898),

89–93; and the numerous reworkings of Adso Dervensis’ tract on the antichrist compiled in De ortu

et tempore Antichristi, ed. Daniel Verhelst, CCCM 45 (Turnhout, 1976). For more on the Last

Emperor legend, see Ch. 4 below.

96 Although there is no evidence that Philip I saw the Descriptio qualiter, it is possible that he knew of it. For example, see Nelson’s comments on how Nithard’s Histories likely circulated and influenced

Charles the Bald’s court. Janet L. Nelson, ‘History-Writing at the Courts of Louis the Pious and

Charles the Bald’, in Anton Scharer and Georg Scheibelreiter (eds.), Historiographie im frühen

Mittelalter (Vienna, 1994), 438–40: also Yitzhak Hen, ‘The Annals of Metz and the Merovingian

Past’, in Uses of the Past, 178.

Charlemagne’s Journey to the East

65

And yet, along with numerous other sources discussed in Chapter 1, both

narratives speak of Charlemagne’s power vis-à-vis the East in similar ways. Charle-

magne is clearly the pre-eminent earthly power in Charroux’s Historia and the

Capetian Descriptio qualiter. What ties all these sources together?

Aside from Benedict of Monte Soratte’s Chronicon, Charroux’s Historia, the

Descriptio qualiter, and the texts directly dependent upon them, there are others

that recount Charlemagne’s legendary journey to the East. The First Crusade

accounts of the anonymous Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolymitanorum,

Peter Tudebode, and Robert of Reims all mentioned that the crusade armies of

Godfrey de Bouillon followed Charlemagne’s overland route to Constantinople.97

The Oxford Chanson de Roland, written in Anglo-Norman, sings of Charlemagne’s

conquest of Constantinople and hints at his future conquests in the East.98 The

early twelfth-century Chronicon from Saint-Pierre-le-Vif of Sens noted that the

monastery received the head of St Quiriacus from Charlemagne, who had brought

the relic back with him from Jerusalem.99 None of these seem to have anything to

do with any other.

The few scholars who have systematically discussed Charlemagne’s journey to

the East have long linked all the sources of the legend together, often simply

presuming their interdependence without offering any substantial evidence to

support this presumption.100 We may suppose that pilgrims or other guests at

97 Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolymatinorum, tr. Rosalind Hill (London, 1962), 2; Peter

Tudebode, Historia de Hierosolymitano itinere, RHC Occ 3: 10–11; and Robert of Reims, Historia

Iherosolimitana, RHC Occ 3: 732. Given their likely provenance, these texts may ultimately be

indebted to the Descriptio qualiter but that connection has yet to be definitively shown. Jay

Rubenstein has now made a compelling case about the relationship between the anonymous Gesta

and Peter Tudebode, in which Rubenstein argues that both likely derive from an earlier text that

comprised a loose collection of sermons and/or ‘campfire stories’. The Gesta compiler gave that

collection more shape and Tudebode lightly glossed that text. It would make sense that, in the end,

Robert essentially did what the Gesta compiler did for his text. Yet we should consider them

independent voices in some regards. Despite their close relationship, each author made choices

about what to include and it seems notable that all three decided it was appropriate to call the Via

Egnatia ‘Charlemagne’s Road’. See Jay Rubenstein, ‘What is the Gesta Francorum and Who was Peter

Tudebode?’, Revue Mabillon, 16 (2005), 179–204; Jean Flori, ‘De l’anonyme normand à Tudebode et

aux Gesta Francorum: L’Impact de la propagande de Bohémond sur la critique textuelle des sources de

la Première Croisade’, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 102 (2007), 717–46; and on the ‘theological

refinement’ to which Robert et al. subjected the Gesta, see Riley-Smith, First Crusade, 135–52.

98 See the discussion in Matthew Gabriele, ‘Asleep at the Wheel? Apocalypticism, Messianism and

Charlemagne’s Passivity in the Oxford Chanson de Roland ’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 43 (2003),

60–3.

99 Chronicon sancti Petri Vivi Senonensis, ed. Robert-Henri Bautier and Monique Gilles (Paris,

1979), 62. Saint-Pierre-le-Vif had close contacts with Fleury and Philip I in the 11th cent., so it is possible that this is how the monks heard of Charlemagne’s journey to the East.

100 The Charroux account is, however, only mentioned by scholars of the abbey and the minor

accounts are rarely noted. For example, see Ralph Lützelschwab, ‘Zwischen Heilsvermittlung und

Ärgernis: Das prepuitum Domini im Mittelalter’, Pecia, 8/11 (2005), 617–18; Giosuè Musca, Carlo

Magno, 77–8; Barton Sholod, ‘Charlemagne: Symbolic Link between the Eighth and Eleventh

Century Crusades’, in Studies in Honor of M. J. Bernadete (New York, 1965), 38–40; Jules Horrent,

Roncesvalles: Étude sur le fragment de cantar de gesta conservé à l’Archivo de Navarre (Pampelune) (Paris, 1951), 203–4; and Folz, Souvenir, 180.

66

The Franks Remember Empire

monastic houses could have encountered each version of the Charlemagne legend

in the various ways those houses commemorated their relics, especially around feast

days. Jongleurs sang about saints, clerics preached in chapter and in the market-

place, etc. Sermons and songs composed at the time of (and after) the Carolingians

often included material taken from histories, hagiographies, relic translations, and

miracles, and even contained references to current events.101 Many could have

heard of Charlemagne’s journey via this route, even if we have no firm evidence that

this happened.

There is no perceptible sense of development among the sources created before

1100––no extant intermediary source between any two of the texts, no textual

dependence of one on another. And we don’t need to find any.102 Instead, I would

suggest that these narratives are not so much ‘different’ as ‘separate’, not so much

products of different traditions as distinct products of a common tradition, linked

by their common theme. As seen in Chapter 1, the early medieval West had a

pervasive preoccupation with the legendary Charlemagne. This preoccupation did

not always textually manifest itself in the same way, appearing, disappearing, and

reappearing in different garb before the twelfth century, but there remained

something tangibly similar among the different sources discussed above––a con-

sensus of sorts on the nature of Charlemagne’s power, manifested, in this case, most

clearly in his domination over the East.

In creating new accounts, all three major pre-1100 sources of Charlemagne’s

journey to the East pushed against the boundaries between memory and history.

Keith Baker’s definitions of the two terms is perhaps best: ‘History is memory

contested; memory is history controlled and fixed.’103 The two terms are not fixed

and oppositional, even if they represent distinct, competing discursive strategies

aimed at controlling the past. Authors constantly redrew the line separating the two

ideas. People in the tenth and eleventh centuries were aware of the great distance

separating them from the Golden Age of Charlemagne’s reign. To narrow that gap,

each author therefore made a choice. ‘History’ ascended by challenging memory,

either continuing or restoring a dialogue about the past, emphasizing distance and

difference, hence establishing a vertical (dissimilar) connection. ‘Memory’ ascended

by fixing what had once been contested, flattening the relationship with the past

101 On the uses and transmission of hagiography, see the summary in Samantha Kahn Herrick,

Imagining the Sacred Past: Hagiography and Power in Early Normandy (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), 6–9.

On sermons, see Thomas N. Hall, ‘The Early Medieval Sermon’, in Beverly Mayne Kienzle (ed.), The

Sermon (Turnhout, 2000), 213, 247–8. On travelers and their reception at hostels and monasteries, see

Bat-Sheva Albert, Le Pèlerinage à l’époque carolingienne (Brussels, 1999), 277–322; Julie Kerr, Monastic Hospitality: The Benedictines in England, c.1070–c.1250 (Rochester, NY, 2007).

102 Bédier and Zucchetti hint at this conclusion. See Bédier, Legendes épiques, iv. 135; and Il

Chronicon di Benedetto, ed. Zucchetti, pp. xxix–xxxi. My conclusions here are a bit different than

Rosamond McKitterick, who has recently argued that we ought to trace Carolingian texts through

‘networks of information’ that connect different sources. Here, there wasn’t one and needn’t have been one. See McKitterick, Perceptions of the Past, 67; and Helmut Reimitz, ‘The Art of Truth:

Historiography and Identity in the Frankish World’, in Richard Corradini (ed.), Texts and Identities

in the Early Middle Ages (Vienna, 2006), 88–9, 97.

103 Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the

Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990), 56.

Charlemagne’s Journey to the East

67

into a horizontal (similar) connection, creating a sense of continuity by choking off

dialogue that might problematize the relationship between past and present.

Benedict of St Andrew lamented the distance he saw between his own time and

the Golden Age of Charlemagne’s reign. He extolled the virtues of Charlemagne

but contrasted them with the Ottonians. No better example of this can be found

than Benedict’s lament for the city under Otto II, in the very last sentences of the

Chronicon.

Woe Rome! So many have oppressed and abused you; you who were captured by the

Saxon king, your people put to the sword, and your power reduced to nothing . . . ! You

conquered noble peoples, you trod on the world, you butchered the kings of the earth.

Rome held the scepter and greatest power; [but the city now has been] forcefully

plundered and polluted by the Saxon king. . . . Woe Leonine city . . . ! For a long time

you have been held; truly, if only [you were] untouched by the Saxon king!104

The passage likely refers to how far the city has fallen since the time of Augustus but

it also, and perhaps more directly, refers to how far it has fallen from Charle-

magne––the Golden Age that Benedict himself earlier discussed. Benedict

chronicled an inverted parabola of rulers, stretching from Julian the Apostate

through Otto II; we slowly ascend to Charlemagne, then descend thereafter.

Benedict wanted to create history: to problematize memory by reigniting a discus-

sion about the proper place of Rome and the papacy, showing the variations in the

city’s fortunes during the reigns of successive rulers––from its apex under Charle-

magne to its current nadir under Otto II.

Charroux’s Historia and the Descriptio qualiter conversely suggested continuity,

creating memory by fixing history. The Charroux legend narrated the intimate

connection between Charlemagne and the abbey at its foundation through a clear,

unbroken, legitimating litany of miracles performed by the Holy Virtue. The

narrative creates horizontal links (similarities) between Charroux and Jerusalem

and between Charlemagne’s Golden Age and the time of the text’s composition, with

the Holy Virtue as the bridge between them. In other words, the author attempted to

create an equivalence: Charroux was just like Jerusalem, and Charlemagne’s Golden

Age was just like the author’s own time, all because of the Holy Virtue. But at the same

time, the Holy Virtue constantly reminded the reader of Charroux’s one particular

vertical (unequal), but timeless connection––Jesus as patron.105 The Descriptio qua-

liter closed its account with the translations of Charlemagne’s relics to sites contempo-

rarily important to Frankish kings, thus stressing not only the legitimating nature of

104 ‘Vé Roma! quia tantis gentis oppressa et conculcata; qui etiam a Saxone rege appreensa fuistis, et gladiati populi tui, et robor tua ad nichilum redacta est . . . ! Celsa tuarum triumphasti gentibus,

mundum calcasti, iugulasti regibus terre; sceptrum tenebat et potestas maxima; a Saxone rege