An Empire of Memory (35 page)

Karls des Grossen’, in Rainer Berndt Jr. (ed.), Das Frankfurter Konzil von 794: Kristallisationspunkt

karolingischer Kultur (Mainz, 1997), 49–79; Hannes Möhring, ‘Karl der Grosse und die Endkaiser-

Weissagung: Der Sieger über den Islam kommt aus dem Westen’, in Benjamin Z Kedar, Jonathan

Riley-Smith, and Rudolf Hiestand (eds.), Montjoie: Studies in Crusade History in Honour of Hans

Eberhard Mayer (Brookfield, Vt., 1997), 1–19; and David van Meter, ‘The Empire of the Year 6000:

Eschatology and the Sanctification of Carolingian Politics’ (Ph.D. Diss., Boston University, 1997).

106 Möhring, Der Weltkaiser der Endzeit, 142–3, 332.

107 Johannes Heil, ‘“Nos Nescientes de Hoc Velle Manere”––“We Wish to Remain Ignorant about

This”: Timeless End, or: Approaches to Reconceptualizing Eschatology after A.D. 800 (A.M. 6000)’,

Traditio, 55 (2000), 77. The apocalyptic idea of the ‘millennial week’ suggests that one day equals

1000 years. Thus, 6000 years would equal the beginning of the ‘last day’, ushering in either the Last

Judgment or an earthly millennium of peace to precede the Last Judgment. The prophecy was

enshrined into mainstream Christian thought by Eusebius and Jerome in the 4th cent. See Robert

E. Lerner, ‘The Medieval Return to the Thousand Year Sabbath’, in Richard K. Emmerson and

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reaction to the Adoptionism controversy speaks consistently in apocalyptically

charged terms such as ‘pseudo-prophets’ and ‘pseudo-christs’, and Alcuin often

used the phrase tempora periculosa (in one instance, specifically in conjunction with

a discussion of Charlemagne’s rule), which he took from the apocalyptic passage of

2 Timothy 3: 1 and Pseudo-Methodius. The successive Frankish defeats of 827, all

at the hands of the ‘pagans’, seem to have shocked the court of Louis the Pious and

spawned apocalyptic concerns. Late Carolingian discussions of antichrist, which are

relatively common, may have been an outgrowth of the preoccupations of this

earlier period.108

Ernst Kantorowicz pointed out long ago that the myth of Christian world unity

was fundamentally eschatological in character. The world began with unity and

would end in unity. In between was discord.109 The Last Emperor legend united

beginning and end by evoking that unity and completing the circle. The legend

sprang up as a reaction to the Islamic invasions of the seventh century, bringing to

mind an idealized, militant Rome, where universal political authority blended

seamlessly with a universal united Christian community.110 The Last Emperor

legend then gestated in the East, cleaving closely to the Byzantine emperors who

remained the standard-bearers of Christian imperial glory in the early Middle Ages.

Then Charlemagne and the Franks appeared. Controlling virtually all of the old

Roman empire in the West, looking to the past to help them understand their

conquests, believing in their own unflagging orthodoxy, perhaps thinking they

lived in a time near the world’s end, the Frankish court under Charlemagne

resurrected and coalesced the two estranged strands of thought––idealized

Roman and apocalyptic, Constantine and Last Emperor––in the late eighth centu-

ry; the Roman and apocalyptic conceptions of empire dovetailing so well because

one derived from the other. Christianity was reconceptualized as a coherent politi-

cal and ideological unit; Charlemagne’s empire came to be defined as ‘the city of

God, and its population . . . Christendom. Outside his empire was the state of the

devil.’111 The empire of the Franks was thought to be a haven for all Christians, a

bulwark against the enemies of God here on earth, but also critically a bulwark

Bernard McGinn (eds.), The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1992), 51–71; and Richard

Landes, ‘Lest the Millennium Be Fulfilled: Apocalyptic Expectations and the Pattern of Western

Chronography 100–800 C.E.’, in Werner Verbeke, Daniel Verhelst, and Andries Welkenhuysen (eds.),

The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages (Leuven, 1988), 137–211.

108 Juan Gil, ‘Los terrores del año 800’, in Actas del simposio para el estudio de los codices del ‘Comentario al Apocalipsis’ de Beato de Liebana, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1978), i. 215–47; Brandes, ‘Tempora’, 49–79; and de Jong, Penitential State, chs. 4–6. Johannes Heil has recently shown how thinkers in the decades after 800

began to create an anti-apocalyptic narrative of history by downplaying the importance of the progression of time and highlighting the survival of the Jews (who would be converted at the End). See Heil, ‘Nos

Nescientes’, 73–103. On late Carolingian apocalypticism, see Hughes, Constructing Antichrist, 121–57;

and Flori, L’Islam et la fin des temps, 177–86.

109 Ernst Kantorowicz, ‘The Problem of Medieval World Unity’, in Selected Studies (Locust Valley,

NY, 1965), 78–9.

110 An idea hinted at in Paul Rousset, ‘La Notion de Chrétienté aux XIe et XIIe siècles’, Le Moyen

Âge, 69 (1963), 192.

111 Adriaan H. Bredero, Christendom and Christianity in the Middle Ages: The Relations between

Religion, Church, and Society, tr. Reinder Bruinsman (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1994), 17.

The Franks’ Imagined Empire

127

against antichrist and the hordes of Gog and Magog––the forces of evil arrayed

against God during the last cosmic battle. The Frankish ‘empire of the mind’

survived as an empire of memory and ‘it was the eschatological dimension that gave

the [Carolingian] idea of empire its extraordinary capacity to withstand the repeat-

ed shocks of confrontation with dissonant political realities’.112

The intellectual themes evident in the Charlemagne and Last Emperor legends,

although perhaps distinct in the eyes of modern historians, were not so easy to

separate in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Like the Last Emperor, Charlemagne

was an archetype––an exemplar. Just as the Last Emperor would preside over a

Golden Age just before the end, so Charlemagne prefigured it, presiding over a

Golden Age in the past. Sometimes texts like Ademar’s Chronicon or Pseudo-

Alcuin’s Vita antichristi explicitly brought the two reigns together, eliding Jerusa-

lem, Christendom, imperium, Charlemagne, and Last Emperor into a coherent

narrative.113 Others, such as the Descriptio qualiter and the Annales of Niederal-

taich, were more allusive, even as they still suggested an intellectual connection

between the empire that was and the empire to come, oftentimes united in the

person of Charlemagne.

But that’s not quite right.

It might be more correct to say that the empires of past and future were united in

the people of the Franks. Chapters 1 and 2 demonstrated that the sources of the

Charlemagne legend, especially those dealing with his remembered dominion over

the East, were also about the Golden Age more generally and the place of the Franks

within it. So too with the Last Emperor, who is himself a rather shadowy figure, his

personality not necessarily as important as the train of events he sets in motion.114

Both legends are primarily about the privileged place that the followers of these rulers

occupied in these legends. Notice how in the Charlemagne legend––Benedict’s

Chronicon, the Descriptio qualiter, and Charroux’s Historia, for example––he is

never without his army. So too with every version of the Last Emperor legend.

These are both militant legends, speaking of victory over their enemies, speaking of

conquest. And, of course, we must remember that the enemies of both Charlemagne

and Last Emperor––leaders of the populus christianus and regnum christianorum,

possessors of imperium––were Christ’s enemies as well.

The Franks were Charlemagne’s heirs. They were the defenders of his legacy,

responsible for resurrecting his empire, which had been intellectually constructed

over the course of more than two centuries to include all Christians West and East.

After Adso’s tenth-century tract, and perhaps even as early as the eighth-century

Latin revision of Pseudo-Methodius, the Franks would lead Christ’s army against

his enemies under the banner of the Last Emperor. The Franks had been the new

imperial people under Charlemagne and would be again at the end. It is, I think, no

112 Nelson, ‘Kingship and Empire’, 73.

113 Verhelst does say elsewhere that the Pseudo-Alcuin synthesized the legends of Charlemagne and

Antichrist with the idea of pilgrimage. He does not, however, expand the idea past this specific text to the Charlemagne legend more generally. Alphandéry does much the same, limiting his discussion to

the call to crusade. See De ortu, ed. Verhelst, 110; and Alphandéry and Dupront, Chrétienté, 24, 51–2.

114 Alexander, ‘Medieval Legend’, 3; and Magdalino, ‘Prophecies’, 52.

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coincidence that the Descriptio qualiter, Charroux’s Historia, the sources around

Otto III, Ademar’s Chronicon, the Exhortatio ad proceres regni, the Annales of

Niederaltaich, Benzo’s Ad Heinricum, Pseudo-Alcuin, perhaps the Oxford Roland,

among others––from places as diverse as the Île-de-France, Normandy, Aquitaine,

Saxony, Lombardy, and Bavaria––all emerged during the eleventh century, and

many clustered towards the century’s end. Charlemagne’s militant, Frankish,

Christian empire prefigured the Last Emperor’s; and in the eleventh century, past

and future began to converge.

5

The Franks Return to the Holy Land

In the early nineteenth century, Victor Hugo published an account of his recent

trip down the Rhine. On that trip, he stopped at Aachen and immediately went to

the chapel of St Mary’s, intent upon paying his respects to Charlemagne. Near the

end his visit, Hugo struck up a conversation with his guide and was surprised to

find that he was a former soldier in Napoleon’s army. Tears streaming from his eyes

as he remembered his old comrades, the soldier told Hugo: ‘You can say, Sir, that

you saw at Aix-la-Chapelle an old soldier of the thirty-sixth Swiss regiment. . . . You

can also state that he is . . . Prussian by chance of birth; Swiss by profession; but

French at heart.’1

At the beginning of book 2 of Guibert of Nogent’s early twelfth-century Dei

gesta per Francos, the abbot displayed an eerily similar understanding of identity.

Shortly after the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, Guibert remembered spewing

invective at an archdeacon from Mainz, contrasting the archdeacon’s ‘Teutonic’

reticence in answering Urban’s call with the Franks’ strength and courage. Just a

few lines later, Guibert clarified his definition of Frankishness. He said: ‘Because

[the name “Frank”] has carried the yoke since the days of its youth, it will sit in

isolation [Lamentations 3: 27–8], a nation noble, wise, war-like, generous, [and]

brilliant above all kinds of nations. Every nation borrows the name as an honorific

title; do we not see the Bretons, the English, [and] the Ligurians call men ‘Frank’ if

they behave well?’2 Guibert knew that the archdeacon’s cowardice––not his prove-

nance––prevented him from answering Urban’s call and hence kept the archdeacon

from being called ‘Frank’ too.

As we have seen in previous chapters, the Charlemagne legend was prevalent

throughout the tenth and eleventh centuries and became increasingly linked to the

East and to the Last Emperor legend as time moved towards 1100. But we have also

seen that the Charlemagne legend was also a legend of the Franks, with the man

standing as an exemplar for a larger truth––that the Franks had held an empire

spanning West and East, leading and defending the populus christianus by the

strength of their arms. In this last chapter, let us then begin by looking more closely

1 Victor Hugo, The Rhine, tr. D. M. Aird (Boston, Mass., 1886), 85. ‘Tel que vous me voyez,

monsieur, j’appartiens à trois nations; je suis Prussien de hasard, Suisse de métier, Français de cur.’

2 Guibert of Nogent, Dei gesta per Francos, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, CCCM 127A (Turnhout, 1996),

108–10. English tr. from Guibert, The Deeds of God through the Franks, tr. Robert Levine

(Woodbridge, 1997), 41. Note that Guibert is initially offended because he was called Franconus,

rather than Francus. This suggests that the archdeacon had a similar understanding of ‘Frank’ and was

excluding Guibert from that category.

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at Frankish identity and how it moved into the eleventh century. The Franks

thought they had once held a special place in sacred history. Is there evidence that

swathes of the eleventh-century aristocracy held on to this notion as they waited,

reassured by the Last Emperor legends that they would reclaim that special place

once again? And then, what are the implications of these ideas? Did they ultimately

move men to action, spurring them, for example, to march eastwards towards

Jerusalem in 1095–6?

F RA N K I SH I D E N T IT Y IN T H E

E L E V E N T H C E N T U R Y

Mary Garrison has recently shown that sources from before the reign of Pepin I the

Short (751–68) often referred to the contemporary ruling dynasty as, indeed,

‘Merovingians’. Eighth- and ninth-century sources, however, did no such thing

for their rulers. Garrison explains that ‘rather than imputing an identity to Charle-