Read An Empire of Memory Online
Authors: Matthew Gabriele
Tags: #History, #Medieval, #Social History, #Religion
An Empire of Memory (20 page)
expoliata et menstruata fortiter. . . . Vê civitas Leoniana! dudum capta fuistis, modo vero a
Saxonicum rege relicta!’ Benedict, Chronicon, 719.
105 Remensnyder speaks of something similar, writing that monasteries in Aquitaine during this
period commonly asserted themselves to be part of the center, hence receptacles of royal/celestial
power. See Amy G. Remensnyder, ‘Topographies of Memory: Center and Periphery in High Medieval
France’, in Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried, and Patrick J. Geary (eds.), Medieval Concepts of the Past:
Ritual, Memory, Historiography (Cambridge, 2002), 199–200.
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The Franks Remember Empire
the Carolingians’ association with these places, but also these sites’ continuing rele-
vance to religious and secular power. Saint-Corneille and Saint-Denis connect,
through their relics and through their royal/imperial patrons, directly to Aachen,
Constantinople, and Jerusalem. As patron of these houses and their relics, Philip I
connected to those ideal rulers from the past.
So, despite these differences in intent and content, all the sources discussed
above, both major and minor, were participating in the same discussion. Charle-
magne was the summit of Frankish power. And the roots of that discussion lay in
the agendas of Charlemagne’s contemporaries and near-contemporaries. Thanks to
recent scholarship by Rosamond McKitterick (among others), we now better
understand the nature of Carolingian historical sources. The ARF, for example,
should be recognized ‘not just as the clever construction it once was, but also as a
collaborative piece of image making by many Frankish scribes over a number of
decades’.106 Carolingian histories like the ARF, Annales Mettenses priores, or
Nithard’s Histories, better called ‘public’ than ‘official’, reflected royal patronage
but filtered it through the concerns and interests of their respective authors,
representing ‘many reflections of an “official viewpoint” coloured by the particular
views of an individual compiler’.107 And as soon as the Carolingians took power,
their goal was to legitimize their line. Pro-Carolingian authors offered a gloss on the
past in order to shape how they were later understood. Events required explanation
and Carolingian success was the greatest proof of all of their legitimacy.108 For
instance, in the ARF, written in several stages between 790 and 829, all things led to
Charlemagne. Pepin the Short’s (751/2–68) reign served as an essential prelude to
that of his son, while the ninth century becomes a necessary adjunct to the Golden
Age of the eighth by palely reflecting its themes. The eighth century was, just
shortly after its passing, portrayed as a Golden Age with Charlemagne as its
centerpiece.109
106 Rosamond McKitterick, ‘Constructing the Past in the Early Middle Ages’, Transactions of the
Royal Historical Society, 6th ser. 7 (1997), 119; idem, History and Memory in the Carolingian World
(Cambridge, 2004), 110–11; and idem, ‘Political Ideology in Carolingian Historiography’, in Uses of
the Past, 168–9. On image-making at Charlemagne’s court, see now the excellent Paul Edward
Dutton, ‘KAROLVS MAGNVS or KAROLVS FELIX? The Making of Charlemagne’s Reputation
and Legend’, in Legend of Charlemagne, 23–37.
107 Yitzhak Hen, ‘The Annals of Metz and the Merovingian Past’, in Uses of the Past, 178. Also, see
the reassessment of Nithard’s intentions, in Nelson, ‘History-Writing’, 435–42.
108 McKitterick, History and Memory, 131, 272. In part, the process of legitimizing the line
involved denigrating the Merovingians. See Paul Fouracre, ‘The Long Shadow of the Merovingians’,
in Joanna Story (ed.), Charlemagne: Empire and Society (Manchester, 2005), 17–19; Rosamond
McKitterick, ‘The Illusion of Royal Power in the Carolingian Annals’, English Historical Review, 115
(2000), 16–18; A. Gauert, ‘Noch einmal Einhard und die letzten Merowinger’, in L. Fenske (ed.),
Institutionen, Kultur und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter: Festschrift für Josef Fleckstein zu seinem 65.
Geburtstag (Sigmaringen, 1984), 59–72.
109 This includes the well-known ‘reviser’, who wrote 814–20. Roger Collins, ‘The “Reviser”
Revisited: Another Look at the Alternate Version of the Annales regni Francorum’, in Alexander
Callander Murray (ed.), After Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History (Essays
Presented to Walter Goffart) (Toronto, 1998), 198; McKitterick, ‘Constructing’, 123–4. On the dating
of the text, see Roger Collins, Charlemagne (Toronto, 1998), 4–6. On Carolingian histories generally,
see McKitterick, History and Memory, 127–8, 131–2. On the Annales Mettenses priores specifically, see
McKitterick, History and Memory, 125–6; Hen, ‘Annals of Metz’, 186–90.
Charlemagne’s Journey to the East
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Although modern historians may have subscribed to the constructed fictions of
these Carolingian authors, until recently describing Charlemagne’s reign as virtually
unblemished––a metaphorical light shining in a dark age––I would argue that our
medieval counterparts were not so fooled.110 A medieval author never intended to
discover the past wie es eigentlich gewesen ist.111 The impact of the ‘linguistic turn’,
combined with the new interest among modern historians (especially historians of
the Middle Ages) in memorial practice, has called into question our understanding
of medieval authorial intention. We now rightly recognize how very tenuous the
line between (modern conceptions of) fact and fiction was in the Middle Ages, and
how memory, reading, and writing were not so much concerned with what was as
with what ought to have been. Essentially, we recognize how malleable the past was
in the Middle Ages, being updated continually to suit the needs of the present.112
Of course, ‘even invented pasts could not be created freely, they had to be likely
enough to have come to pass’.113 To take just one example, Benedict’s account of
how Charles took possession of the Holy Places may stem from him simply
misreading Einhard but I would suggest that Benedict consciously reshaped the
narrative to conform with what he believed had ‘actually’ happened. Einhard said
that Harun granted Charles the Holy Sepulcher because of their great friendship, so
Benedict said that Charlemagne had actually gone East to receive its submission
himself because this probably made sense to him. As Mary Carruthers has so
effectively illustrated, ‘the “inaccuracy” we find so frequently in medieval citation
is often . . . the result of a deliberate choice on the authors’ part, either at the stage of
initial memorizing or (and I think more frequently) at that of composing’. In other
words, medieval reading was active, making little distinction between what had
been read in a book and what that reader had actually experienced.114
Any given author or reader would have ingrained mental catenae of associations
for certain key words. It would only be necessary to ‘dream’ on such words to reach
conclusions perhaps originally unintended. Mayke de Jong points out that readers
must have recognized the reference by Hincmar of Reims and by the Annals of
Fulda to the stench of Charles the Bald’s corpse as invoking Antiochus from the
book of Maccabees. Readers of Hrabanus Maurus’ commentary on Maccabees
would also have recognized the reference to the antichrist. The Rhenish armies of
the First Crusade similarly took the language of ‘Jerusalem, Charlemagne,
110 The claim of modern historians being fooled is from McKitterick, ‘Illusion of Royal Power’, 4.
See also the comments of Richard E. Sullivan, ‘The Carolingian Age: Reflections on its Place in the
History of the Middle Ages’, Speculum, 64 (1989), 279.
111 The phrase is Leopold von Ranke’s, although Peter Novick explained that Ranke likely did not
mean it as literally as it has since been interpreted. See the discussion in Peter Novick, That Noble
Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), 26–30.
112 Catherine Cubitt, ‘Memory and Narrative in the Cult of the Early Anglo-Saxon Saints’, in Uses
of the Past, 31; Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, 1994), 177–81; Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Prose
Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), 10; among others. See also the
discussion in the Introduction, above.
113 Walter Pohl, ‘Memory, Identity and Power in Lombard Italy’, in Uses of the Past, 27.
114 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge,
1990), 89 (quotation), also 168–9, 190.
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Sepulcher, [and] infidels or enemies of Christ’ in Urban’s call as a reference to the
Last Emperor legend, hence an exhortation to attack Jews during their march to
the Holy Land.115 Reading and ‘consuming’ a text made it the reader’s own, and he
could impart meaning to it that may not have originally been present. In the case of
our great Frankish emperor, ‘Charlemagne’ meant ‘Golden Age’, ‘Christendom’,
‘Holy Land’, ‘power’, ‘protector’, ‘relics’, etc.––all ideas manifested in all of our
sources, albeit in different measure.116
The obvious bears restating: words are multivalent. Keith Baker wrote that
‘individual acts and utterances may therefore take on meanings within several
different fields of discourse simultaneously. . . . Thus language can say more than
any individual actor intends: meanings can be appropriated and extended by others
in unanticipated ways.’117 And this, I think, is a critical point. While we ought to
be sure that we do not minimize the contextual differences that separate our
sources, we should also recognize the striking similarities in how they portray
Charlemagne’s empire and how each source similarly plays with that common
conception. All these sources dealt with Charlemagne and, especially during the
eleventh century, they tended to illustrate his power, his glory, by talking about his
relationship with the East. Much of this eastward gaze had to do with Charlemagne
himself, but there were also other tenth- and eleventh-century developments we
should consider. They are the subject of the next chapter.
115 Mayke de Jong, ‘The Empire as Ecclesia: Hrabanus Maurus and Biblical Historia for Rulers’, in
Uses of the Past, 223; Jean Flori, ‘Une ou plusieurs “Prèmiere Croisade?” Le Message d’Urbain II et les plus anciens pogroms d’Occident’, Revue Historique, 285 (1991), 22; and Matthew Gabriele, ‘Against
the Enemies of Christ: The Role of Count Emicho in the Anti-Jewish Violence of the First Crusade’, in
Michael Frassetto (ed.), Christian Attitudes toward the Jews in the Middle Ages: A Casebook (New York, 2006), 61–82. On the power of rhetoric and ideology in the First Crusade, see Ch. 5, below.
116 This is similar to Eugene Vance’s conception of Charlemagne as discourse. See his ‘Semiotics
and Power: Relics, Icons, and the “Voyage de Charlemagne à Jérusalem et à Constantinople”’, Romanic
Review, 79 (1988), 170–1.
117 Baker, Inventing, 7. For example, ‘Babe Ruth’ may mean ‘baseball’ or ‘New York Yankees’,
while to others it may also mean ‘home runs’ and ‘curse of the Bambino’, while to still others the name can also mean ‘pitcher’ and ‘Lou Gehrig’ and ‘Yankee stadium’. A text on Ruth might not explicitly
evoke all of these associations but a knowledgeable reader encountering that text would likely make the missing associations anyway. Meaning does not inherently reside in text or reader but in the peculiar
interplay between specific text and specific reader.
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Latin Christianity has always had a deeply nuanced relationship with Palestine. For
ancient, medieval, and modern Christians, ‘Jerusalem’ has conjured a jumbled
series of images: the Promised Land, Davidic kingship, Jesus’ ministry, his passion,
and the promised paradise––whether spiritual or terrestrial––for the elect at the end
of time. At times, and especially during the eleventh century, the West palpably
longed for the city. Churches dedicated to or modeled after the Holy Sepulcher
sprang up throughout Europe. Relics of the human Christ, many linked to his life
and death in Jerusalem and often said to have come directly from the East,
proliferated across Latin Christendom.1 Pilgrimage to the Holy Land increased in
frequency and the century was punctuated by several large groups traveling to the
East together.
In previous chapters, we have seen how the boundaries of Charlemagne’s
imagined empire seemed to expand inexorably eastwards. But, to risk stating the
obvious, the Charlemagne legend did not develop in a vacuum. The legend
interacted with and at times grew alongside the West’s peculiar, and chang-
ing, conception of Jerusalem, a conception that is critical to the development of
the Charlemagne legend. Many who lived during the eleventh century may have
desired the city, but for very long periods the medieval West seemed to think that
Jerusalem was largely irrelevant. So, let us now turn and gaze at Jerusalem,
pilgrimage, and how those ideas could excite the eleventh-century mind in
