Free An Empire of Memory by Matthew Gabriele Page B

where Charles was told to go and conquer
    Italy.79 The extant accounts of Otto III’s entrance into Charlemagne’s tomb all
    testified to Charlemagne’s sanctity in various ways, especially his potency as relic.80
    Charlemagne’s association with the miraculous also became much more com-
    mon the closer we get to 1100.81 God granted Charles a miracle in Charroux’s
    Privilegium because He favored Charles’s plan for a new abbey dedicated to Him.
    The late eleventh-century Descriptio qualiter Karolus Magnus had Charlemagne and
    his army miraculously led out of a dense forest by a talking bird, who heard
    Charlemagne singing Psalms.82 By the time of the Oxford Roland, Charlemagne
    remained in constant contact with God through visions and regular conversations
    with the Archangel Gabriel. Charlemagne was even able to ask for (and receive) a
    miracle in the text.83
    Why these local moves towards sanctification? Why elevate Charlemagne to the
    ranks of the holy? Part of this process was self-reinforcing and had much to do with
    Medieval France’, in Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried, and Patrick J. Geary (eds.), Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography (Cambridge, 2002), 209–10.
    76 Folz, Études, p. viii; Remensnyder, ‘Topographies of Memory’, 209–10.
    77 Einhard based the form of his biography of Charlemagne on hagiography. Although his
    anecdotes primarily followed Roman models, by around 840 CE the new form of the Vita Karoli
    began to influence later hagiography. See Ganz, ‘Einhard’s Charlemagne’, 39–40.
    78 ‘Divina revelatione previdit sanctissimus pontifex quod ex prefato rege Pippino ea nocte concipi
    debuisset pueri qui totius regni monarchium possessurus et omnes erroneus ab ecclesia esset
    depulsurus.’ Traditiones et antiquitates Fuldenses, ed. Ernst Friedrich Johann Dronke (Osnabrück,
    1966), 64; cf. Alcuin, The Life of St. Willibrord, tr. C. H. Talbot, in Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’
    Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and Thomas Head
    (University Park, Pa., 1995), 193–4.
    79 On the Visio Karoli, see the discussion above at n. 15; and Chronicon Novaliciense, 99. Cf. Peter
    Damian, Life of St. Romuald of Ravenna, tr. Henrietta Leyser, in Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology,
    ed. Thomas Head (New York, 2000), 298, 307.
    80 See the discussion in Gabriele, ‘Otto III’, 111–32.
    81 Karl-Heinz Bender, ‘La Genèse de l’image littéraire de Charlemagne, élu de Dieu, au XIe siècle’,
    Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, 31 (1967), 37.
    82 Descriptio qualiter Karolus Magnus clavum et coronam Domini a Constantinopoli Aquisgrani
    detulerit qualiterque Karolus Calvus hec ad Sanctum Dyonisium retulerit, in Die Legende, 108–9. For
    more on Charlemagne’s imagined relationship to the natural world, now see Paul Edward Dutton,
    Charlemagne’s Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age (New York, 2004), 43–68.
    83 La Chanson de Roland, ed. Gerard J. Brault (University Park, Pa., 1978), ll. 719–36, 2529–69
    (dreams); 2525–8, 2845–8, 3610–11, 3993–4001 (Gabriel); 2448–57 (miracle); also the comments in
    Bender, ‘Genèse’, 40–6. The miracle is comparable to Joshua 10: 12–15.
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    The Franks Remember Empire
    Charlemagne’s roles as founder and patron. His foundation of a monastery and/or
    donation of a relic added to his sanctity and hence enhanced his ability to legitimate
    that monastery or relic. Charroux’s Privilegium, for instance, promoted Charle-
    magne as founder and patron, not Charlemagne as king. Count Roger of Limoges
    may have been the monastery’s actual founder but he barely figured in the narrative
    at all. By c.1085, Roger would be fully eclipsed by Charles and disappear completely.84
    Similar to the process at work in other monastic accounts, Charlemagne was the ‘real’
    founder of Charroux. It had its lands because of Charlemagne. It had its