An Empire of Memory (22 page)

was conceptualized as a Christian empire, whose rulers were new kings of Israel. As

such, Jerusalem was their primary imperial ideal. Rome too may have been

important, but only through Constantine, who, in turn, led back to Jerusalem.14

Because it represented the center of imperium Christianum, Aachen became the

Carolingian Jerusalem in all of its iterations––as center of Israel, as center of the

world, as image of the Holy Sepulcher, and as a representation of the heavenly

Jerusalem. So, by this logic, any ‘paradigmatic paradise’, any archetypal earthly

institution, such as society, the empire, or the monastery, was thought by the

ninth-century Franks to be an image of the new Jerusalem.15

The Carolingians did not invent this reading of the holy city. Gregory of Tours

in Glory of the Martyrs used Radegund of Poitiers as the Helena of the West,

translating Jerusalem to the churches of Gaul through its relics.16 Another Gregory,

the great pope (590–604), perceived the monastery as a center of reform, hence a

refuge of peace and contemplation, and the surest path towards salvation. Pope

Gregory explained Jerusalem to represent the act of contemplation itself and more

generally the contemplative way of life. In effect, Jerusalem was both an allegory of,

and an allegory for, monasticism and the cloister.17 Bedan (and subsequent

Carolingian) exegesis of the Temple of Solomon made the monastery function

within a series of Christian Old Testament symbols, leading to Jerusalem at the

apex––‘Ark-Altar-Tabernacle-Temple-Jerusalem’.18 We should not underestimate

14 Even then, many (such as Alcuin) never compared Charlemagne to Constantine, instead keeping

with David. See Kühnel, From the Earthly, 118; Donald Bullough, ‘Empire and Emperordom from

Late Antiquity to 799’, Early Medieval Europe, 12 (2003), 386; and esp. Thomas F. X. Noble, The

Republic of St. Peter: The Birth of the Papal State, 680–825 (Philadelphia, 1984), 287–301. See also the discussion in Ch. 4, below.

15 Aryeh Graboïs, ‘Charlemagne, Rome and Jerusalem’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 59

(1981), 792–809; Pierre Riché, ‘La Bible et la vie politique dans la haut Moyen Age’, in Pierre Riché

and Guy Lobrichon (eds.), Le Moyen Âge et la Bible (Paris, 1984), 388–98; Robert Folz, The

Coronation of Charlemagne, 25 December 800, tr. J. E. Anderson (London, 1974), 121–3; Doig,

Liturgy and Architecture, 114; and Roger Collins, Charlemagne (London, 1998), 150–1. On the

Marian church at Aachen and Jerusalem, see Kühnel, From the Earthly, 117; Prawer, ‘Jerusalem’,

775; Bredero, ‘Jérusalem’, 264; and Renna, Jerusalem, 122–8. On Frankish ideas of imperium,

see Ch. 4, below.

16 Gregory of Tours, Liber in gloria martyrum, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM (Hanover, 1885),

1: 489–93, explicit comparison of Radegund and Helena at 489.

17 Bredero, ‘Jérusalem,’ 261, 271; Graboïs, Le pèlerin occidental, 80; and Renna, Jerusalem, 86–7.

18 Kühnel, From the Earthly, 127; and especially Samuel Collins, ‘Domus domini patet figura

mysterii: Architectural Imagination and the Politics of Place in the Carolingian Ninth Century,’ (Ph.D.

Diss., History, University of California, Berkeley, 2005). This reading of the cloister as Jerusalem also stems from the peculiar use of anagogy in the early Middle Ages. Henri de Lubac suggests that anagogy

could exegetically function in two ways during this period. The first was objective, doctrinal, defined by the object of consideration, and speculative. The second was subjective, defined by the manner of

understanding, and contemplative. The first sense led to a concrete, historical, and eschatological

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the importance of the ideas emanating from this Carolingian monastic revival,

which placed Jerusalem front-and-center. At the very least, monasticism in the

Carolingian age institutionalized the idea––ubiquitous by c.1000––that monks had

a ‘special role vital to the spiritual condition and salvation not only of individual

monks, but of the total Christian community’.19 Ideas from Carolingian ‘centers’––

court or cloister––spread outwards.20 And the monastic liturgy of the Carolingian

age, filled as it was with paeans to the city of David, commemoration of the Passion,

and praise for the new Jerusalem to come, only served to remind one of the holy

city and cement its association with the cloister in the minds of that liturgy’s listeners.

For instance, at Saint-Riquier under Abbot Angilbert (d. 814), the liturgical pro-

cession on Palm Sunday virtually mimicked that which took place in Jerusalem. This

elision of cloister and Jerusalem continued even after the last Carolingian ruler. For

instance, in East Francia an Ottonian book of pericopes from Echternach crowned a

picture of its monastic scriptorium with a rhomboidal structure punctuated with

towers, paralleling contemporary depictions of the heavenly Jerusalem.21

But interest in the terrestrial city of Jerusalem never disappeared and can be seen

in that the anagogical Jerusalem took on characteristics of the literal, earthly city.

Carolingian and Ottonian illustrators generally preferred abstract representations of

the holy city, either harking back to Old Testament symbols of Jerusalem as the city

of the promise (historical) or presenting idealized representations of the heavenly

Jerusalem (anagogical). In illustrated Carolingian apocalypses, the heavenly Jerusa-

lem was almost always represented as circular, even though Revelation said that the

city to come would be square. Noticing this apparent irony, Carol Heitz concluded

that these images must be based on the Anastasis––the rotunda Constantine

constructed over Jesus’ tomb. The city rebuilt (and more specifically the churches

at the Holy Sepulcher built) by Constantine had come to be idealized and

reproduced in the West as an image of the mystical city.22

reading, while the second sense led to a more contemplative, figurative reading––i.e., imagining the

presence of the Heavenly Jerusalem on earth (in the cloister, in this instance). See de Lubac, Exégèse Médiévale, 624–5; and McGinn, ‘Iter sancti Sepulchri,’ 41–2.

19 Richard E. Sullivan, ‘What Was Carolingian Monasticism? The Plan of St. Gall and the History

of Monasticism,’ in After Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Their Sources of Early Medieval History, ed.

Alexander Callander Murray (Toronto, 1998), 284.

20 On ideas moving outwards from Charlemagne’s court, now see Janet L. Nelson, ‘Charlemagne

and Empire’, in Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick (eds.), The Long Morning of Medieval

Europe: New Directions in Early Medieval Studies (Burlington, Vt., 2008), 223–34. On ‘center’ and

‘periphery’ as they relate to monasteries especially, see Amy G. Remensnyder, ‘Topographies of

Memory: Center and Periphery in High Medieval France,’ in Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried, and

Patrick Geary (eds.), Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography (Cambridge, 2002), 193–214.

21 On Saint-Riquier, see Kühnel, From the Earthly, 92–5. For more on Angilbert’s liturgical

program, see Susan A. Rabe, Faith, Art, and Politics at Saint-Riquier: The Symbolic Vision of Angilbert (Philadelphia, 1995), 122–32. On Echternach, see Kühnel, From the Earthly, 135.

22 ‘The city had four sides, and it was as wide as it was long.’ Rev. 21: 16. Heitz, Recherches sur les rapports, 133–7. There are also much earlier examples. Robert Wilken points to a 4th-cent. floor

mosaic in his, Land Called Holy, 124. See also Kühnel, From the Earthly, 166–7, and esp. plates 1–125.

New Jerusalems and Pilgrimage to the East before 1100

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J E R U S A L E M A N D P I L G R I M A G E F R O M T H E W E S T

D U R I N G T H E E L E V E N T H C E N T U R Y

Sometime shortly before 1030, Ralph Glaber recounted the fiery destruction of

Orléans. In Orléans, Ralph began, there was an ancient nunnery possessing an icon

of the crucifix. It began suddenly to weep in 988, ‘for the Saviour is said to have

wept for Jerusalem when He foresaw its imminent destruction, and similarly it is

proved that He wept, through the icon representing Him, for this city of Orléans

when it was on the verge of a calamity’. Shortly afterwards, a wolf burst into the

city’s cathedral, seized the bell-rope, and rang the bells of the church. The city

burnt to the ground the following year. Bishop Arnulf of Orléans began the

rebuilding effort with the cathedral, formerly dedicated to St Stephen but now

rededicated to the True Cross (!), and financed with the recent discovery of a

miraculous cache of gold buried by an early bishop of Orléans named St Evurtius.

Arnulf, however, did not stop there. He ordered that every church in the city be

rebuilt more magnificently than it was before. People returned and the Frankish

king (Robert the Pious) once again favored the city as his principal seat.23 Ralph’s

description of the destruction and rebuilding of Orléans parallels the destruction of

Jerusalem by Titus in 70 and its rebuilding under Constantine in the fourth

century, as well as the liturgy of the ninth Sunday after Pentecost, with both

centered around Luke 19: 41–4 (Jesus’ tears for Jerusalem and the crucifix’s tears

for Orléans) and a commemoration of the loss of Jerusalem.24 Fiery destruction

cleansed both cities and miraculous discoveries spurred their respective reconstruc-

tions and new devotions to the cross. Bishop Arnulf functioned as a new Con-

stantine, rebuilding the city from the ashes. A new Jerusalem in the West was

reborn in new Orléans.

In the eleventh century, Jerusalem became closer––more familiar––to the West

than it ever had before. The monastic rebirth that had begun under the Carolin-

gians and gathered momentum in the late tenth century following the reforms of

Cluny and Gorze (among others), led to the image of Jerusalem enjoying some-

thing of an intellectual renaissance during this period. Marcus Bull has demon-

strated that Jerusalem was so commonly held to have sat atop a complex hierarchy

of cult centers that eleventh- and early twelfth-century miracle collections con-

sistently appropriated imagery of the city in order to lend sanctity to their own cult

centers.25 As Gregory of Tours, Gregory the Great, and any number of Carolingian

23 The entire passage can be found at Ralph Glaber, The Five Books of the Histories, ed. and tr. John

France (Oxford, 1989), 64–9. See John France’s dating of the narrative ibid., pp. xxxiv–xlv.

24 Stephen G. Nichols, Jr., Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography (New

Haven, Conn., 1983), 24; Guy G. Stroumsa, ‘Mystical Jerusalems’, in Lee I. Levine (ed.), Jerusalem: Its Sanctity and Centrality to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (New York, 1999), 354; and on the liturgy of the ninth Sunday of Pentecost, Linder, ‘Jews and Judaism’, 117.

25 Marcus Bull, ‘Views of Muslims and of Jerusalem in Miracle Stories, c.1000–c.1200: Reflections

on the Study of the First Crusaders’ Motivations,’ in Marcus Bull and Norman Housley (eds.), The

Experience of Crusading, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 2003), i. 31–4; and Jonathan J. G. Alexander, ‘“Jerusalem the Golden”: Image and Myth in the Middle Ages in Western Europe’, in Bianca Kühnel (ed.), The

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intellectuals had suggested before, there were many new Jerusalems scattered

throughout the West.

Jerusalem first gave its name to a church in Bologna in the eighth century but the

consistent evocation of the city in stone (primarily through the Holy Sepulcher) did

not begin in earnest until around the millennium.26 In this period, notes on the

measurements of the Holy Sepulcher were often taken at Jerusalem and brought

back to be used in religious constructions. As Richard Krautheimer has shown,

these measurements could be used selectively and were often intentionally impre-

cise. Architectural imitation in the Middle Ages mattered not in the exactness of the

replication but in the implication of the architectural style, two things being

comparable so long as there were some outstanding elements they had in common.

In other words, these recreations of the Holy Sepulcher reproduced their targets

allegorically.27

Under the Carolingians, the abbey church at Saint-Riquier evoked the Holy

Sepulcher by recreating its layout and emulating architectural features from its

basilica (the Martyrium). The chapel of St Michael at Fulda, and the chapel

dedicated to St Mary at Aachen echoed the round shape of the Anastasis, or rotunda

over Christ’s tomb. The Ottonian chapel of St Maurice at Constance did the

same.28 Already having the first church dedicated to the Holy Sepulcher in the

West, Bologna in the tenth century began to construct other shrines in the city

similar to those found in the Holy Land. ‘The whole complex, then, was created as

a “theme park” of sorts, the first Eurodisney, offering a reproduction of Jerusalem,

Real and Ideal Jerusalem in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Art: Studies in Honor of Bezalel Narkiss on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday (Jerusalem, 1998), 255. For a dissenting view, however, which suggests

that Jerusalem did not play a distinctive role in Western piety during the 11th cent., see Bernard

Hamilton, ‘The Impact of Crusader Jerusalem on Western Christendom’, Catholic Historical Review,

80 (1994), 697; and Sylvia Schein, ‘Jérusalem: Objectif originel de la Première Croisade?’, in Michel