Authors: Matthew Gabriele

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Riquier (d. 1143) all saw no problem in using epic poems as sources for their

chronicles. Monasteries often invoked characters from epic in an effort to legitimize

falsified charters. Conversely, jongleurs and their audiences considered their works

to be accurate representations of the past.26

The apparent disconnect between medieval and modern historians’ perceptions

of truth is likely due to our tendency to project our own definition of what separates

24 Bernard Guenée has argued that the Middle Ages held on to a fundamental opposition between

truth and fiction, which he defined as history and poetry. Bernard Guenée, Histoire et culture historique dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris, 1980), 19. But see also Nancy Partner’s rather dismissive comments on medieval historians who believed fiction ‘quite artlessly’: Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago, 1977), 190–1.

25 See Felice Lifshitz, ‘Beyond Positivism and Genre: “Hagiographical” Texts as Historical

Narrative’, Viator, 25 (1994), 102–8; Coleman, Ancient and Medieval, 300; Monika Otter,

‘Functions of Fiction in Historical Writing’, in Nancy Partner (ed.), Writing Medieval History

(London, 2005), 111; and now the intriguing Robert M. Stein, Reality Fictions: Romance, History,

and Governmental Authority, 1025–1180 (Notre Dame, Ind., 2006). On the tyranny of previous

scholarship on the questions we ask of our sources, see the thoughtful comments in Anthony Grafton,

April Shelford, and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of

Discovery (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); and Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins

of Europe (Princeton, 2002), 16–38.

26 Catherine Cubitt, ‘Memory and Narrative in the Cult of the Early Anglo-Saxon Saints’, in Uses of

the Past, 29–66. On Hugh and Hariulf, see Albert Pauphilet, ‘Sur La Chanson de Roland’, Romania, 59

(1933), 172–8. On Albert, see Susan B. Edgington, ‘Albert of Aachen and the Chansons de Geste’, in

John France and William G. Zajac (eds.), The Crusades and Their Sources: Essays Presented to Bernard

Hamilton (Brookfield, Vt., 1998), 23–37. On epic, jongleurs, and monasteries, see Joseph J. Duggan,

‘Medieval Epic as Popular Historiography: Appropriation of the Historical Knowledge in the

Vernacular Epic’, Grundriss der romanischen Litteraturen des Mittelalters, 11/1 (1986), 304–5. Robert

Stein has coined the term ‘reality fictions’ to engage with the medieval programs of truth. See Stein, Reality Fictions, 31–3.

Introduction: Looking for Charlemagne

fact from fiction back onto the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, what mattered

was the text’s truth claim, rather than its truth value––‘not whether it corresponds

to fact . . . but how it asks to be taken by the reader’. Historical truth in the Middle

Ages should simply be defined as that which was willingly believed. Anything

belonging to a widely accepted tradition could fall into this category, regardless of

where that tradition might fall according to modern definitions of fiction.27 If they

all make the same truth claims, a monastery’s chronicle, a hagiography, and a

vernacular epic all said something meaningful to their contemporary audiences

about what happened in the past.28 So to determine that truth claim––to determine

whether or not a text was thought to make a meaningful claim about the past––we

must seek out the middle ground, what Spiegel has called the ‘social logic of the

text’. The moment of a text’s––any text’s––inscription fixes its historical reality,

revealing implicit and explicit desires, interests, and beliefs that are all socially

constructed. A monastery’s Latin annals should be read as a literary creation, just as

much as a vernacular epic should be read as a historical artifact. Images work in

much the same way.29 An interdisciplinary approach shows us that general and

specific are both important, together.

Sources of the Charlemagne legend predating the twelfth century are especially

representative of this double, interpenetrating dialectic between memory and

history, and fact and fiction. Although the events described in sources of the

Charlemagne legend may be demonstrably ‘false’ by modern standards (Charlemagne

never actually went to Jerusalem, nor did he conquer all Iberia), many contemporaries

believed them to be true and believed that the sources recording such events said

something meaningful about the past.30 So, both general themes and specific context

matter. Not every text made the same claims about Charlemagne’s Golden Age. But

many did, from diverse places and times, spread across much of Europe and through-

out the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. What did it mean to make such claims

27 Quotation from Otter, ‘Functions of Fiction’, 112. See also Suzanne Fleischman, ‘On the

Representation of History and Fiction in the Middle Ages’, History and Theory, 22 (1983), 305–6;

Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Schichtman, King Arthur and the Myth of History (Gainesville, Fla.,

2004), 9, 14–16; and Leah Shopkow, History and Community: Norman Historical Writing in the 11th

and 12th Centuries (Washington, DC, 1997), 1–2.

28 e.g. the Carolingians may have used Virgil’s Aeneid as a representation of the Trojan/Roman past.

The Chanson de Roland was sung to the Norman contingent at Hastings to inspire them by example.

The lay aristocracy of late medieval France contested encroaching royal control by using vernacular

prose translations of the Pseudo-Turpin. Hagiography was certainly thought to be a true account of

what had happened. See McKitterick, History and Memory, 209; William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum

Anglorum, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1998), 455; Jean

Frappier, ‘Réflexions sur les rapport des chansons de geste et de l’histoire’, Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie, 73 (1957), 4–6; and Spiegel, Romancing the Past. Again, Brian Stock’s idea of textual

communities seems to lurk just behind this analysis. See n. 21 above.

29 Spiegel, Past as Text, 24–8, 53–6; Hayden White, ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact’, in

Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978), 81–100; and Matthew Gabriele,

‘Asleep at the Wheel? Apocalypticism, Messianism and Charlemagne’s Passivity in the Oxford Chanson

de Roland ’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 43 (2003), 46–72.

30 Morrissey, Charlemagne and France, 14. This seems analogous to Monika Otter’s conclusion that

there are ‘plenty of indications that many readers [of Geoffrey of Monmouth] took the story of Brutus, the mythical founder of Britain, and the story of Arthur, the ideal king and conqueror of the known

world, as “historical”’. Otter, ‘Functions of Fiction’, 110.

Introduction: Looking for Charlemagne

locally and what did it mean that such claims were so similarly expressed in sources so

disparate?

Charlemagne came to represent something politically, religiously, and socially

special to those who wrote about him. To say something about Charlemagne in the

ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries was to say something about how you under-

stood yourself and your own place in sacred history. But the Charlemagne legend

also spoke to ideas of community, sanctity, and violence. Especially in the eleventh

century, speaking of him was a way of saying something about a universal commu-

nity of Christians, that community’s special place in God’s eyes, and your relation-

ship to that community in the arc of sacred history.31

Charles––later Charlemagne––came to the throne in 768 CE after the death of his

father, Pippin the Short (741–68). Initially, Charles shared control of his father’s

kingdom with his brother Carloman (768–71) but after his death, Charles suc-

ceeded to his brother’s possessions. Charles attempted to reform the practice of

Christianity in his realm and attracted the leading minds of the time to his court.

He conquered the Lombards, Saxons, and Avars, and expanded into Iberia. He

shared friendly relations and exchanged emissaries with the Islamic Caliph and

patriarch of Jerusalem, and earned the grudging respect of the Byzantines. At the

height of his power, Charles controlled a territory extending from Rome to the

English Channel, and from Saxony past Barcelona. On Christmas Day 800 CE,

Charles was crowned as Augustus by Pope Leo III (795–816) at Rome.

Charles died in 814, having been king for forty-six years and Augustus for

fourteen. He was interred in the chapel of St Mary’s which he had constructed at

Aachen. His youngest and only surviving son Louis (the Pious, 814–40) traveled

north from Aquitaine to take possession of the empire. The legend of Charlemagne

began then.

31 On Charlemagne as symbol, see Eugene Vance, ‘Semiotics and Power: Relics, Icons, and the

“Voyage de Charlemagne à Jérusalem et à Constantinople”’, Romanic Review, 79 (1988), 170; also

Morrissey, Charlemagne and France, 10. For a forceful argument on the necessity of listening for

people’s beliefs, see Geoffrey Koziol, ‘Is Robert I in Hell? The Diploma for Saint-Denis and the Mind

of a Rebel King (Jan. 25, 923)’, Early Medieval Europe, 14 (2006), 233–67.

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P A R T I

T H E F R A N K S R E M E M B E R

E M P I R E

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The Birth of a Frankish Golden Age

Nithard, Frankish historian and grandson of Charlemagne, began his ninth-century

Histories by reminding his readers of a lost Golden Age. After his dedication,

Nithard remembered:

When Charles of blessed memory, rightfully called the great emperor by all nations,

died at a ripe old age . . . , he left the whole of Europe flourishing. For in his time he was

a man who so much excelled all others in wisdom and virtue that to everyone on earth

he appeared both terrible and worthy of love and admiration.1

Nithard later concluded the history, thoroughly disillusioned, by evoking that

Golden Age once more.

In the time of Charles the Great of good memory, who died almost thirty years ago,

peace and concord ruled everywhere because our people were treading the one proper

way, the way of the common welfare, and thus the way of God. But now since each

goes his separate way, dissension and struggle abound. Once there was abundance and

happiness everywhere, now everywhere there is want and sadness. Once even the

elements smiled on everything and now they threaten. . . . About this time . . . , there

occurred an eclipse of the moon. Besides, a great deal of snow fell in the same night and

the just judgment of God . . . filled every heart with sorrow. I mention this because

rapine and wrongs of every sort were rampant . . . and now the unseasonable weather

killed the last hope of any good to come.2

1 ‘Karolus bone memoriae et merito Magnus imperator ab universis nationibus vocatus . . . in senectute bona decedens omnem Europem omni bonitate repletam reliquit, vir quippe omni sapientia et omni

virtute humanum genus suo in tempore adeo praecellens, ut omnibus orbem inhabitantibus terribilis,

amabilis pariterque et amirabilis videretur.’ Nithard, Historiarum libri III, ed. E. Müller, MGH SRG

(Hanover, 1907), 44: 1. I have slightly modified the English tr. from Nithard, Histories, in Carolingian Chronicles, tr. Bernhard Walter Scholz (Ann Arbor, 1970), 129–30, in order to put the appellation magnus with imperator (where it seems to belong). David Ganz points out that Einhard was the first to call Charles magnus and that this appellation was by no means self-evident in the early 9th cent., even if it quickly stuck.

David Ganz, ‘Einhard’s Charlemagne: The Characterisation of Greatness,’ in Joanna Story (ed.),

Charlemagne: Empire and Society (Manchester, 2005), 49.

2 ‘Nam temporibus bone recordationis Magni Karoli, qui evoluto iam pene anno XXX. decessit,

quoniam hic populus unam eandemque rectam ac per hoc viam Domini publicam incedebat, pax illis

atque concordia ubique erat, at nunc econtra, quoniam quique semitam quam cupit incedit, ubique

dissensiones et rixae sunt manifestae. Tunc ubique habundantia atque leticia, nunc ubique poenuria atque mesticia. Ipsa elementa tunc cuique rei congrua, nunc autem omnibus uibue contraria. . . . Per idem

tempus eclypsis lunae XIII. Kal. Aprilis contigit. Nix insuper multa eadem nocte cecidit meroremque

omnibus, uti praefatum est, iusto Dei iuditio incussit. Id propterea inquam, quia hinc inde ubique rapinae et omnigena mala sese inserebant, illinc aeris intemperies spem omnium bonorum eripiebat.’ Nithard,

Historiarum, ed. Müller, 49–50. English tr. from Nithard, Histories, tr. Scholz, 174.

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