Free An Empire of Memory by Matthew Gabriele Page A

as well––a commemoration of Christ through (in the form of) Charlemagne.
    Note, however, that this relationship between Charlemagne and Christ functioned as
    an analogy, not an equivalence. In a way that echoes the relationship between exegetical
    figures and fulfillments, Charlemagne was not another Christ but a Christ-type,
    sanctified and elevated ‘to at least the rank of holy’.73
    Before the middle of the twelfth century, the real movement in Charlemagne’s
    sanctification occurred locally, independent of royal or imperial prompting––again,
    in the religious houses scattered throughout Charlemagne’s old empire.74 In East
    Francia, there is evidence of local liturgical veneration of Charlemagne from the
    tenth to early twelfth centuries at Cologne, Halberstadt, Hildesheim, Münster,
    Neustadt-am-Main, Sitten, and Verden, while commemoration of Charles at
    Gellone may have begun as early as the eleventh century.75 But contrary to Robert
    Folz’s assertion that the empire was effectively ‘where the idea of the sanctity of
    71 Remensnyder, Remembering, 165–7, quotation at 167.
    72 ‘Patriarcha Hierosolymitanus desiderans eum honorare, multumque placere ei, miserat illi ab
    Hierosolymis per Zachariam . . . illud Dominicae Crucis venerabile cunctisque mortalibus adorandum
    phylacterium, gemmarum splendoribus et auro purissimo [etc.]. . . . Haec tibi semper erunt nostrae
    dilectionis vera et certissima signa, frequens recordatio, memoria sempiterna, Haud enim dubium, quia
    quoties cumque haec sancta vel oculis aspexeris, vel manibus tenueris, Domini tui Caroli oblivisci non poteris.’ Vita s. Willelmo monachi Gellonensis, AASS, 6 May: 805. English tr. from Remensnyder,
    Remembering, 169.
    73 Remensnyder, Remembering, 171. Stephen Nichols has also noted how Charlemagne in effect
    mediated the christological representations of medieval rulers. For example, Charles the Bald first had to ‘emulate the models of Solomon and Charlemagne, and then Christ’. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr.,
    Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography (New Haven, Conn., 1983), 85–8,
    quotation at 85. See the discussion of figure-fulfillment relationships in Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura’, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York, 1959) 11–76; and Jean Danielou, From
    Shadows to Reality, tr. Wulstan Hibberd (Westminster, Md., 1960). Contemporary society was also
    exhibiting an increasing devotion to Christ at that time. Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion:
    Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York, 2002), 7–192.
    74 On the reticence of the West Franks to pursue canonization, see Robert Folz, ‘Aspects du culte
    liturgique de Saint Charlemagne en France’, in KdG iv. 77–80.
    75 Robert Folz, Études sur le culte liturgique de Charlemagne dans les églises de l’Empire (Paris, 1951), 15–38; Matthias Zender, ‘Die Verehrung des Hl. Karl im Gebiet des mittelalterlichen Reiches’, in
    KdG iv. 108–11; and Amy Remensnyder, ‘Topographies of Memory: Center and Periphery in High
    The Birth of a Frankish Golden Age
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    Charlemagne was born’, Remensnyder has shown how widespread a phenomenon
    this process of sanctification actually was and how this process took a number of
    forms other than liturgical commemoration in local religious communities.76 For
    example, besides his increasing association with Christ, anecdotes from Charlemagne’s
    life came more and more to mirror those found in hagiography.77 Just as with
    St Willibrord, a prophecy heralded Charles’s birth in an eleventh-century manuscript
    from Fulda, in which St Boniface told Charles’s father Pepin that Charles will ‘possess
    the whole of the kingdom and expunge all error from the church’.78 Much like
    St Romuald of Ravenna, Charlemagne received visions, such as his prophetic Visio
    written during the reign of Louis the German, or the one recounted in the early
    eleventh-century Chronicon Novaliciense,