Le Voyage de Charlemagne: Mediterranean Palaces in the
Medieval French Imaginary
Sharon Kinoshita
University of California, Santa Cruz
This essay reads the parodic epic Le voyage de Charlemagne à Jérusalem et à Constantinople
as a cultural expression of contact between Francophone “feudal” society and the “medieval
culture of empire.” By the twelfth century, Latin expansion into the Holy Land and southern
Italy had brought French speakers into intimate contact with the great tributary empires of the
Mediterranean world. Drawing on recent work from historians and art historians, I take
Charlemagne’s visit to Constantinople as a confrontation less with King Hugh than with his
palace, exemplifying an elaborate court culture at odds with representations of Frankish power.
To speak of “empire” in the Latin Middle Ages is to speak of Charlemagne. Crowned in Rome on
Christmas day 800 by Pope Leo III, Charlemagne presided over a revival of the notion of the Roman
Imperium and, during his 46-year reign (768-814), assembled a massive land empire stretching from Saxony
in the northeast to Barcelona in the southwest. 1 Though it was formally partitioned in 843 by the treaty of
Verdun, the memory of this empire cast a long shadow over much of the rest of the European Middle Ages,
as evidenced by the crowning of Otto I in 962 and, in the twelfth century, by rival French and Germanimperial claims to the legacy of Charlemagne. In his landmark 1993 work The Making of Europe, historian
Robert Bartlett defined the “European” culture that emerged between 950 and 1350 as the product of
Carolingian and post-Carolingian institutions and programs of standardization—diffused among the newly
converted pagans on the northern and eastern margins of “Europe” by a combination of conquest,
colonization, and acculturation. Told from this point of view, the history of the twelfth-century
Mediterranean is in part the history of the rapid “expansion” of European culture via the “aristocratic
diaspora”—whether in the form of the crusades or of the gradual assimilation of peripheries like Christian
Spain or Norman Sicily (in Latin Europe but not completely of it).
This essay seeks to stand that perspective on its head. In the mid- twelfth century, Bartlett’s postCarolingian “Europe” in fact lay on the periphery of a Mediterranean basin divided among the Byzantine and
Fatimid empires, the Crusader states, and the Seljuk emirates in the east, and the Almohad empire, the Italian
maritime cities of Amalfi, Pisa, Venice, and Genoa, the Crown of Aragon, and the Norman kingdom of Sicily
1
On the understanding of “empire” attending Charlemagne’s coronation and its aftermath, see Folz, The
Concept of Empire, chap. 2.
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in the west. 2 In this advanced precapitalist world, as political theorist Samir Amin has described, economic
relations were relatively transparent (with surplus extracted as “tribute”); power relations, on the other hand,
were highly mystified, such that “[i]f...one were to write the theory of the tributary mode of production,” its
title, as Amin puts it, “would have to be Power, instead of Capital […], and the title of the first chapter ‘The
Fetishism of Power’ instead of ‘The Fetishism of Commodities’” (Eurocentrism, p. 5). Concentrating his
attention on the metaphysical underpinnings of the tributary mode of production, Amin has little to say of its
cultural forms and practices—the material realization of its mystification of power. A picture may be
assembled, however, from recent work in history and in art history on the lavish court cultures of the
medieval Mediterranean and beyond. Centered in great capitals like Córdoba, Constantinople, and Cairo, the
tributary culture of empire was articulated through a constellation of highly ritualized ceremonial practices
(the reception of ambassadors and supplicants, the distribution of honors) typically staged in magnificently
ornate palaces and marked by the circulation of beautiful objects rendered as tribute, bestowed as favors, or
exchanged as diplomatic gifts. One striking aspect of this “shared culture of objects” (Grabar) is that—
contrary to our modern tendency to read the history of this period through the lens of religious difference—
court ceremonials and the rich material culture they supported, being predominantly secular in nature, could
readily cross confessional divides. Moving away from notions of fixed and discrete cultural traditions, art
historians have begun increasingly to recognize the numerous forms and practices linking the medieval
Islamic, Byzantine, and Latin Mediterranean worlds. 3 Elsewhere I have suggested that the pride-of-place
which precious silks from places like Almería, Alexandria, Syria, and Constantinople held in the feudal
imaginary bespeaks the fascination this Mediterranean culture of empire exerted over more of the northerly
reaches of Latin Europe (Kinoshita, “Almería Silks”). But silks were only one part of a larger cultural
ensemble to which Latin princes on the periphery of the tributary Mediterranean could subscribe. 4 When the
Norman Count Roger II of Sicily took the title king in 1130, he constructed an iconography of kingship out
2
The more mundane aspects of this world—the business, travels, and domestic lives of artisans and
merchants, judges and scholars, women and slave girls, their multi-lingualism and multi-confessional
interactions—have been reconstructed in remarkable detail by historian Goitein in his monumental fivevolume work, A Mediterranean Society.
3
Anthony Cutler, for example, has recently asserted that between the tenth and twelfth centuries, Byzantine
culture showed “greater affinities” with other “eastern” (i. e., Islamic) societies than with either the ancient
world or the medieval west (“The Pathos of Distance,” p. 159). The element of mystification Amin alludes to
comes into play to the extent that, historically, the recourse to highly ceremonial courts or elaborate building
programs frequently marked not the absoluteness of power but its fragility. On Justinian, see Shepard,
“Courts,” p. 19; on the ‫ع‬Abbasid caliph Mu’tasim, Blair and Bloom, “Iraq, Iran, and Egypt,” pp. 118-23; on
the Umayyad caliph ‫ع‬Abd al-Rahman III, see Safran, The Second Umayyad Caliphate.
4
Compare Bartlett’s assessment of “European” culture as a package deal, extremely appealing to pagan
chieftains on the northern and eastern edges of Latin Europe, that included not only Roman-rite Christianity
but literacy (in the form of the Carolingian miniscule standardized in court chanceries), the minting of coins,
universities, and even chivalry (The Making of Europe).
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of elements appropriated neither from the Capetians nor from the Ottonians but from the courts of
Constantinople and Fatimid Cairo. 5 Typically relegated to the fringes of “medieval Europe,” places like the
Norman kingdom of Sicily turn out to have been privileged points of contact between the Mediterranean
culture of empire and the Latin West (Kinoshita, “Almería Silk,” pp. 174-75).
This essay reads the twelfth-century parodic epic, Le voyage de Charlemagne à Jérusalem et à
Constantinople, as a literary representation of the northern French encounter with this tributary culture of
empire. Composed in Anglo-Norman in the second half of the twelfth century, Le voyage de Charlemagne
imagines quite a different reaction to the tributary culture of empire. A comic “prequel” to the Chanson de
Roland, it portrays the great Frankish emperor struggling to save face when confronted by the manifestly
superior culture of Byzantine Constantinople. The story opens in the abbey church of Saint-Denis outside
Paris when the emperor Charles dons his regalia and loudly demands of his queen if she’s ever seen a greater
ruler. His question is rhetorical, so he is stunned when she suggests that King Hugh of Constantinople might
be more magnificent than he. 6 Humiliated before his assembled barons, Charles abruptly announces a
pilgrimage to Jerusalem, giving him the perfect cover for his real aim: to visit Constantinople in order to take
the measure of his rival for himself. After a triumphant (if slightly comic) visit to Jerusalem, where the
patriarch grants him the epithet “Charles magnes” and loads him down with relics to take home as souvenirs,
Charles proceeds to Constantinople, to test for himself the veracity of his wife’s provocative words. Standard
readings of the text naturally focus on Charlemagne’s encounter with Hugh the Strong, the magnificent king
the Franks first encounter in the fields outside his capital, sitting atop a golden plough. This essay looks
instead at Charlemagne’s confrontation with Hugh’s palace—the objective correlative of Byzantium’s
cultural superiority over feudal Europe.
I. In twelfth-century vernacular literature, palaces evoke the fabulous worlds beyond Carolingian
“Europe.” At the outset of La prise d’Orange (roughly contemporary with Le voyage de Charlemagne),
Guillaume Fierebrace—fresh from his conquest of Nîmes—sets his sights on nearby Orange, still under the
rule of the Saracen emir, Tiebaut. Drawn to the city by an escaped prisoner’s account of its manifold riches
(not least, the incomparable beauty of its queen, Orable), Guillaume is nonetheless unprepared for the
magnitude of the splendor that awaits him. Disguised as a Saracen messenger,
5
In one symbolically resonant example, his magnificent red silk coronation robe—inscribed in Arabic and
adorned with motifs typical of the “shared culture of objects”—proclaimed his royalty in a visual language of
power legible across the Mediterranean (Kinoshita, “Almería Silk,” p. 174, drawing on Tronzo). See also
Johns, “The Norman Kings of Sicily.”
6
Hugh, we should note, is a characteristically French name, associated with the founder of the Capetian
dynasty and, in the twelfth century, with the comital house of Blois-Champagne. In an article meant to
contrast divergent Latin attitudes towards the Byzantine Empire, historian Angeliki Laiou creates two
imaginary travelers journeying to Constantinople in the year 1162: a Venetian merchant named Paolo
and the younger son of a noble family of Champagne, whom she dubs “Hugh de Troyes” (“Byzantium
and the West”).
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Li quens Guillelmes vet tote voie avant
Trusqu’au palés roi Tiebaut le Persant.
De marbre sont li piler et li pan
Et les fenestres entaillies d’argent
Et l’aigle d’or qui reluist et resplent;
Soleil n’i luist, n’i cort goute de vent.
“Dex,” dist Guillelmes, “beau pere roi amant,
Qui ainz mes vit palés si bien seant?
Tant par est riches li sires de ceanz! (ll. 458-66)
Built in marble and silver, the palace impresses not by its size but by the fineness of its material and the
virtuosity of its construction. Particularly noteworthy is the way the structure creates a hermetically enclosed
interior space—a ceanz impervious to sun and wind. To understand why Guillaume finds this scene so
overwhelming, we need only consider the account of the palace of King Louis the Pious at the outset of Le
charroi de Nîmes (prequel to La prise d’Orange). Returning to Paris from a hunting expedition, the valiant
but landless Guillaume Fierebrace crosses the Petit Pont and then sweeps into the royal palace like a force of
nature:
A pié descent soz l’olivier ramé,
Puis en monta tot le marbrin degré.
Par tel vertu a le planchié passé
Rompent les hueses del cordoan soller;
N’i ot baron qui n’en fust esfraez.
Voit le li rois, encontre s’est levez. (ll. 53-58)
In the passage, the royal palace—synecdochically conveyed by the marble steps leading to the great hall on
the first floor—commands no attention whatsoever; rather, all eyes are on Guillaume, whose energy compels
the awe of the barons and elicits a gesture of recognition from the king himself. In a sense, the simplicity of
the palace symbolizes the weakness of a do-nothing king: in the epic corpus, Louis—though Charlemagne’s
son and legitimate successor—repeatedly appears as a bumbling and ineffectual ruler. More generally, the
discrepancy between the palaces of Paris and Orange exemplifies the distance between the worlds of feudal
France and the medieval Mediterranean culture of empire.
In the eleventh and even the twelfth century, the signature structure of French feudal society remained
the castle—a tangible symptom of the fragmentation of centralized authority triggered by the partition of
Charlemagne’s empire in 843 and exacerbated by the Viking invasions of the ninth and early tenth centuries.
Palaces, in contrast, played a limited role in the projection of royal power. In England, contemporary sources
refer not to palaces but to “the king’s house”; royal residences were essentially large manors, centered on a
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great hall—“the most characteristic building of the Middle Ages” (Coldstream, Medieval Architecture, pp.
23, 120 7 ). These could be large: William II Rufus’s Great Hall at Westminster, at 240 by 67.5 feet, was the
largest in England and possibly the largest in Europe at the time (James, The Palaces of Medieval England,
pp. 28, 34). But unlike the dedicated throne rooms or audience halls typical of, for example, the Great Palace
of Constantinople, these tended to be multifunctional spaces used for dining and sleeping as well as for
diplomatic and courtly functions. Moreover, since the Norman kings of England regularly traveled back and
forth to their possessions on the continent, “the palace might be said to exist at whichever residence a
monarch […] found himself at any particular time” (James, The Palaces of Medieval England, p. 9). 8 In
twelfth-century France, the king’s residence in Paris was a Carolingian-type civil palace at the western tip of
the Ile-de-la-Cité comprising an audience hall (aula), chapel (capella), private residence (camera), and a
massive circular tower resembling those of contemporary castles. Not until after returning from the Third
Crusade did Philip Augustus begin construction of the Louvre—a defensive fortification that only gradually
assumed the form and function of a true royal palace (Bove, “Les palais royaux,” pp. 45-79). 9
Little wonder, then, that in Old French literature, palaces figure little in the representation of royal
splendor in the Latin West. In Wace’s Roman de Brut (c. 1155), for example, the account of Arthur’s
coronation at Caerleon consumes several hundred lines, with nary a mention of his palace; Arthur’s grandeur
is conveyed not by the architectural magnificence of the setting but by the extensive roster of kings and
nobles attending his court and especially by the tremendous bustle such a vast gathering entails:
Qant la corz le roi fu jostee,
Molt veïssez bele asanblee,
Molt veïssez cité fremir,
Sergenz aler, sergenz venir,
Osteus seisir, osteus porprandre,
Meisons voidier, cortines tandre,
As mareschaus osteus livrer,
Soliers et chanbres delivrer,
A cez qui n’avoient ostés,
Fere loiges et tandre trés.
Molt veïssez as escuiers
7
On the difficulties of terminology, p. 132. Coldstream’s index lists twenty entries for “halls” and none for
palaces.
8
The strongly itinerant nature of the Anglo-Norman monarchy is reflected in the disparate birthplaces of the
numerous children of Henry II, Henry III, or Edward III—in contrast, for example, to the Byzantine
emperors, who made every effort to assure that their children were porphyrogenitoi—born in the porphyry
chamber in the Great Palace of Constantinople.
9
Renewed French interest in palaces is evidenced in collected volumes like that of Auzépy and Cornette.
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Mener palefroiz et destriers,
Fere estables, peissons fichier,
Chevaus mener, chevaus lier,
Chevaus forbir et abevrer,
Avoinne, fuerre, herbe porter. (ll. 1791-806)
Caerleon’s “built environment” is mentioned only in passing:
Au matin, le jor de la feste,
Ce dit l’estoire de la geste,
vendrent tuit troi li arcevesque,
Et li abé et li evesque,
El palés le roi coronerent,
Et puis au mostier le menerent. (ll. 1813-18, emphasis added)
In the Mediterranean and West Asia, on the other hand, palaces were an integral part of the semiotics of
power, “a ceremonial and dramatic stage-set intended to present the emperor as an awe-inspiring and
heavenly world ruler, [...] enshrined above ordinary mortals” (Smith, Architectural Symbolism, p. 130). 10
From Córdoba in the west to Baghdad in the east, palaces were designed to amaze. A common topos of the
period is that of the foreign ambassador so overcome by the splendor of the court that he gapes silently in
wonder. The more important the visitor—and the greater the culture he represented—the more satisfying the
effect. In 949, Byzantine envoys at the caliphal court of ‫ع‬Abd-al Rahman III of Córdoba were “awestruck by
the evidence of the splendor of the kingdom and the greatness of the ruler” (Safran, The Second Umayyad
Caliphate, p. 72). For good measure, the local official designated to deliver a speech for the occasion “was
so overwhelmed by the moment and the glory of the caliphate that he could not speak and fell into a swoon”
(Safran, pp. 71-72). Rulers of minor kingdoms sought to reproduce the same effect on a smaller scale: a
tenth-century Armenian chronicle describes the palace of Aghtamar (on an island in Lake Van) as “so
lavishly decorated that a viewer attempting to examine just one section of the dome would be utterly
overwhelmed” (Jones, “The Visual Expression,” pp. 221, 225-26). The symbolic significance of palaces in
tributary culture is evident in the special attention lavished on them in poetry and literature; in Old French as
well, splendid palaces (as we have seen in the case of La prise d’Orange) are frequently associated with the
tributary cultures of the non-Latin Mediterranean. 11
10
Thus “the organization of space in a royal residence was seldom controlled by considerations of comfort
and privacy, but rather by precedent and a desire to dramatize the ruler's exalted role as a godlike being”
(Smith, Architectural Symbolism, p. 130).
11
In Arabic, one finds poems devoted to palaces in Samarra (near Baghdad), Madinat al-Zahra (outside
Córdoba), and Seville (Ruggles, Gardens, Landscape, and Vision, p. 143); in Persian, Haft Paykar, a twelfth-
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The raw splendor of the palace itself was often enhanced by artificial “marvels” or wonders. In 917, two
envoys sent to Baghdad by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII (author of the Book of Ceremonies) were
greeted by chirping mechanical birds and fountains spewing rosewater and musk (Book of Gifts and Rarities,
p. 154; see also pp. 148-55). In the same century, the audience hall of the palatial complex of Madinat alZahra, outside Córdoba,
was constructed out of sheets of variously tinted marble so fine as to be translucent. In the
centre of the room stood a large shallow bowl containing mercury: it stood on a base which
could be rocked, and it was so placed as to receive sunlight from a number of surrounding
apertures. When the caliph wished to impress or alarm anyone who had been granted an
audience he would sign to a slave to rock the bowl and the sunbeams reflected from the surface
of the mercury would flash and whizz round the room like lightning (Fletcher, Moorish Spain,
p. 66, emphasis added).
One of the most famous examples of such marvels is to be found in Liutprand of Cremona’s account of his
949 embassy to Constantinople on behalf of Berengar of Ivrea (the future king of Italy). In the reception
room, Liutprand reports, was
a bronze tree, gilded, in front of the emperor’s seat. Different species of birds, also in gilded
bronze, crowded its branches and sang different songs, according to their species. The
emperor’s throne was conceived with such art that, at certain moments, you’d see it on the
ground, then higher, and, soon after, in the air. It was immense in size, and lions—perhaps in
bronze, perhaps in wood, but covered in gold—seemed to guard it and roared, mauls open and
tongues lolling, beating the ground with their tails (Auzépy and Cornette, Palais et pouvoir, p.
15).
Where most accounts of palatial wonders are told from the perspective of the culture thus proven to be
“superior,” Liutprand’s narrative vividly evokes the way such marvels were experienced by their intended
victims. Of particular interest is his emphasis on the special pains he took to withhold any expression of
amazement:
At my arrival, the lions roared and the birds sang, but this struck me with neither terror nor
admiration, because I had been informed of all this by people who had experienced it. So,
century romance featuring a magnificent seven-domed palace, each dome housing one of King Bahram’s
seven brides (Nizami, The Haft Paykar; see also Meisami, “Palaces and Paradises”); and in Greek, book VII
of Digenis Akritas, describing the splendid palace built by the eponymous hero on the banks of the
Euphrates.
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bowing before the emperor, I made reverence three times, then raised my head; and, whereas I
had seen him seated a little distance above the ground, I [now] saw him, wearing different
clothes, seated almost as high as the ceiling. He said nothing to me directly, but, through the
intermediary of the logothete, inquired after the health and well-being of Berengar. After I had
answered his question, I exited at a sign from the interpreter (Auzépy and Cornette, p. 15,
emphasis added).
To be forewarned is to be forearmed: knowing what was coming, Liutprand makes a point of not being
amazed at the emperor’s mechanical wonders and steels himself against betraying the slightest sign of awe at
the levitating throne. In Byzantium, where “impassivity” and “hieratic calm” were highly valued and
carefully cultivated signifiers of “unchanging imperial majesty” (Cameron, “The Construction of Court
Ritual,” p. 107), for him to have kept his equanimity in the face of such a spectacle is to have maintained his
own dignity and that of his royal master. One can just picture him collapsing in relief once safely outside the
reception hall.
In contrast to Liutprand, our fictional Charlemagne enters Constantinople with no forewarning at all—
just an uncomfortable sense of insecurity planted by his wife’s suggestion that Hugh is the more magnificent
king. Given the discrepancies we have noted between French feudal society and the Mediterranean culture of
empire, it is little wonder if Charlemagne and his men react to Hugh’s palace with stupefaction. Significantly,
their initial impression is recorded through the eyes of the emperor himself:
Charles vit le paleis et la richesce grant:
A or fin sunt les tables, les chaeres, li banc.
Li paleis fu listez d’azur, et avenant,
Par mult cheres peintures a bestes, a serpenz,
A tutes creatures et a oiseaus volanz.
Li paleis fud voutuz et desure cloanz,
E fu fait par cumpas et seret noblement;
L’estache del miliu neelee d’argent.
Cent colunes i ad de marbre en estant:
Cascune est or fin or neelee devant,
De quivre et de metal tregeté dous enfanz:
Cascun tient en sa buche un forn d’ivorie blanc.
Si galerne ist de mer, bise ne altre vent
Ki ferent al paleis de devers occident,
Il le funt turneer et menut et suvent
Cumme röe de char qui a tere decent.
Cil corn sunent et buglent et turent ensement
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Cum taburs u toneires u grant cloches qui pent;
Li uns esgardet l’altre ensement en riant
Que ço vus fust viarie que tut fussent vivant.
Karles vit le paleis et la richece grant;
La sue manantise ne priset mie un guant;
De sa mullier li membret que manacé out tant. (ll. 342-64, emphasis added)
If Le voyage de Charlemagne stages a confrontation between the Eastern and Western empires, the work
of intimidation on the part of the Greeks is attributed not to King Hugh but to the palace itself. 12 Framed by
the ring composition of lines 342 and 360 and heightened by the anaphora of lines 344 and 347, this long and
detailed description clearly designates li paleis as a significant character in this dramatic encounter between
the Byzantine East and the Latin West. 13 As Charlemagne marvels at its riches, declaring it superior to any
built by Alexander (the standard against whom all tributary wealth is measured) or Constantine, a sudden
maritime breeze causes the palace to take on a life of its own:
Devers les porz de mer uït un vent venir:
Vint bruant al palais, d’une part l’acuillit;
Cil l’a fait esmuveir et süef et serrit:
Altresil fait turner cum arbre de mulin.
Celes imagines cornent, l’une a l’altre surrist,
Oue ceo vus fust viarie que il fussent tuz vis:
C’est avis, qui l’ascute, qu’il seit en paraïs,
La u li angle chantent et süef et seriz.
Mult fud grant li orages, la neif et li gresilz,
E li vent durs et forz qui tant bruit et fremist.
Les fenestres en sunt a cristal mult gentilz,
Tailees et cunfites a brasme utremarin:
Laenz fait tant requeit et süef et serit
Cumme en mai en estet quant soleil esclarcist.
12
When the Serbian ruler Stephen Nemanja visited Constantinople in 1172, Emperor Manuel I Comnenos,
who “knew […] the value of art as a political and diplomatic tool” (Jones and Maguire, “A Description of the
Jousts,” p. 137), made a point of showing him mosaics in the domed ceiling of the Blachernai Palace
depicting his own defeat at Manuel’s hands several years before (Jones and Maguire, p. 120, citing
Eustathios of Thessaloniki).
13
On the volatility of French-Byzantine relations in the twelfth century, see Kinoshita, “The Poetics of
Translatio,” pp. 320-22; on Constantinople as a site exceeding western categories of analysis, see Kinoshita,
Medieval Boundaries, pp. 152-63.
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Mult fut gres li orages et hidus et costis;
Karles vit le paleis turneer et fremir:
Il ne sout que ceo fud, ne l’out de luign apris. (ll. 369-86, emphasis added)
The palace itself is a mechanical marvel. Moreover, as it begins to shake, rattle, and roll, Charlemagne’s
terror is increased by the fact that doesn’t know what’s happening, for—unlike Liutprand—“he had not
learned of it from afar” (l. 385). Taken unaware, he and his hapless Franks cringe in terror:
Ne pout ester sur pez, sur le marbre s’asist.
Franceis sunt tuz verset: ne se poënt tenir
E covrirent lur ches et adenz et suvin,
E dist li uns a l’altre: “Mal sumes entrepris;
Les portes sunt uvertes, si n’en poüm issir.” (ll. 387-91)
If Charlemagne and his warriors are not quite struck dumb in amazement, their posture says it all: the mighty
Franks, who had swept into Jerusalem and cowed the patriarch, now cower on the floor and cradle their
heads, reduced to quivering fools by the palace of Constantinople.
In the late eleventh century at the western end of the Mediterranean, the Aljafería—the pleasure palace
of the Muslim king of Saragossa—served as the backdrop for refined soirées devoted to wine drinking and to
the composition and recitation of richly ornate verse (Robinson, “Seeing Paradise”). Nothing could be further
from those highly aestheticized occasions than the gabs, or drunken boasts, in which Charlemagne and his
men now indulge. That night, after a fine banquet and a lavish evening’s entertainment, the Franks vent their
fear, rage, and humiliation in a torrent of verbal aggression. Very much in keeping with the low “ritual
profile” contemporary accounts attribute to the historical Charlemagne—a “convivial figure” more marked
by “cheerful kindliness” than by majesty (Nelson, “The Lord’s Anointed,” pp. 156, 179)—our fictional
Charles and his twelve peers settle in for a night of serious drinking. Alone (as they think) in the great
chamber Hugh has put at their disposal, the Franks first vent their aggression in the vocabulary of military
conquest—aimed, significantly, at Hugh’s palace:
Veez cum gent palais e cum forz richetet!
Pleüst al rei de glorie, de sainte majestet
Carlemaine mi sire les oüst recatet
U cunquis par ses armes en bataile champel! (ll. 449-52)
Then, in a display of blustery machismo, they brag one after the other of the astounding physical feats they
will perform in vindication of their powers. Most notorious of all is Olivier’s that he will “do” the emperor’s
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virgin daughter one hundred times—an embarrassingly puerile display of raw sexual aggressivity. 14 But, not
accidentally, two of the gabs target the palace itself: Guillaume d’Orange boasts he will take a massive gold
and silver ball and hurl it “through this palace” [“par mi cel palais”] (l. 514), taking out forty stretches of
wall: “Mais de quarante teises del mur en abatrai” (ll. 514-15). For his part, Ogier de Danemark offers to
squeeze the central pillar of the palace so tightly it will shatter, causing the entire building to crumble (ll.
521-25).
The next morning, the Franks are mortified to learn that their boasts have been overheard. Hugh calls
them to account, demanding that they make good on their gabs or sacrifice their heads. First it is Olivier’s
turn: though he “does” the princess a mere thirty times, he persuades her to tell her father it was a hundred.
Deflated, Hugh then chooses the boast of Guillaume d’Orange. Aided by the miraculous power of the relics
Charlemagne has brought from Jerusalem, Guillaume accomplishes his boast to the letter. Surveying the
damage, King Hugo was saddened “de sun palais fenduz” (l. 753). In the Chanson de Roland, Michelle
Warren has observed, the verb fendre is used to describe “warriors cloven in half in the midst of battle” and
is “nearly always fatal” (Warren, “The Noise of Roland,” p. 15). 15 Here that fate is reserved for Hugh’s
palace: the proof of the Franks’ civilizational inferiority and the instrument of their humiliation, it becomes
the focus of Latin European rage and resentment against the tributary culture of empire.
Conclusions
In his magisterial study, L’architecture des palais et des jardins dans les chansons de geste, Alain Labbé
reads the literary representation of Charlemagne in twelfth-century French epic as an instantiation-invariation of the iconographic motif of the roi en majesté. Imperial Rome is cast as “le patrimoine
fondamental de la pensée et de l’art d’Occident” (pp. 357-58), with Charlemagne as the heir of a tradition
running from Nero’s Domus Aurea and Hadrian’s villa, through the Carolingian and Ottonian revivals, down
to poems like the Chanson de Roland and Le voyage de Charlemagne à Jérusalem et à Constantinople. Nor
is that the end of the story. In his assessment of the legacy of Charlemagne, Alessandro Barbero writes:
Charlemagne’s imperial coronation consecrated the birth of a new political space, which at the
distance of over a thousand years still appears familiar. This is a Europe in which France and
Germany are the principal partners, northern Italy is more integrated than southern Italy,
Catalonia more than the rest of Spain, and from which Great Britain is in some way removed.
This Nordic and continental Europe, which is Latino-Germanic in its culture, diffident toward
the Mediterranean regions, and almost entirely ignores the Greeks and Slavs of the East, is a
legacy of Charlemagne. It is not at all surprising that today the union’s heart and head are to be
14
15
On this episode, see Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries, pp. 67-72.
Compare Paris, p. 12.
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Sharon Kinoshita
found in Brussels, Strasbourg, and Maastricht, all at the core of the ancient Frankish lands
(Charlemagne, p. 114).
My reading of Le voyage has sought to interrupt this seamless narrative of translatio studii, of the linear
migration of empire. The way its plot unfolds, I have argued, invites us to shift frames of reference, to
reconsider the medieval West in general and Old French epic in particular in the broader geohistorical
context of the medieval Mediterranean. By characterizing Europe as a peripheral form of the tributary mode
of production, part of a regional system centered in Eastern Mediterranean (Amin, Eurocentrism, p. 10), we
can reconfigure the “Franks”—a medieval neologism Bartlett defines as connoting “aggressive westerner far
from home” (The Making of Europe, pp. 102, 105)—not only as the bearers of this European expansion, but
as the agents of contact with the tributary culture of the high medieval Mediterranean.
The brute physical force Charlemagne and his vassals deploy against King Hugh, his daughter, and his
palace may, of course, be read as metaphors of the military might the historical crusaders unleashed against
Jerusalem in 1099 and Constantinople itself in 1204—a kind of barbarian incursion into the Mediterranean
world not unlike that of the Seljuk Turks, the crusaders’ main foes. At the same time, the sense of awe and
humiliation Charlemagne undergoes, no matter how parodic, registers the very real discrepancies between the
cultures of power in feudal Europe and the tributary Mediterranean. In this time “before European
hegemony” (Abu-Lughod), the topos of the westward migration of empire, from the Mediterranean to
northern Europe (and ultimately across the Atlantic) was—like the boasts of Charlemagne’s knights—more
ideological bluster than historical reality.
At roughly the same time Le voyage de Charlemagne was being composed, the successors of Roger II of
Sicily (whom we met above) were constructing on the outskirts of Palermo a string of pleasure palaces so
reminiscent of North African structures that until the mid-nineteenth century they were thought to be
remnants from the island’s Islamic past (Mallette, The Kingdom of Sicily, p. 17). Like other palaces from
across the tributary world, the Favara (from fawwara, Arabic for a natural fresh water spring) was
immortalized in contemporary writings in Arabic (notably in a qasida by al-Atrabanishi, a twelfth-century
poet “from Trapani”), Latin, and Hebrew (Mallette, pp. 26-27). In Decameron V.6, La Cuba—constructed c.
1180 by the last Norman king, William II—was used as the setting for Boccaccio’s romantic tale of Gian di
Procida, set in the aftermath of the Sicilian Vespers (1282). Marvels of both technology and design (La Zisa
was cooled by sea breezes channeled into its walls), these palaces, better remembered in literature than in
history, instantiate the momentary existence of Latin Europe’s other approach to medieval Mediterranean
tributary culture.
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