An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem Before the First Crusade

by Matthew Gabriele

Beginning shortly after Charlemagne's death in 814, the inhabitants of his historical empire looked back upon his reign and saw in it an exemplar of Christian universality - Christendom. They mapped contemporary Christendom onto the past and so, during the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the borders of his empire grew with each retelling, almost always including the Christian East. Although the pull of Jerusalem on the West seems to have been strong during the eleventh century, it had a more limited effect on the Charlemagne legend. Instead, the legend grew during this period because of a peculiar fusion of ideas, carried forward from the ninth century but filtered through the social, cultural, and intellectual developments of the intervening years. Paradoxically, Charlemagne became less important to the Charlemagne legend. The legend became a story about the Frankish people, who believed they had held God's favour under Charlemagne and held out hope that they could one day reclaim their special place in sacred history. Indeed, popular versions of the Last Emperor legend, which spoke of a great ruler who would reunite Christendom in preparation for the last battle between good and evil, promised just this to the Franks. Ideas of empire, identity, and Christian religious violence were potent reagents. The mixture of these ideas could remind men of their Frankishness and move them, for example, to take up arms, march to the East, and reclaim their place as defenders of the faith during the First Crusade. An Empire of Memory uses the legend of Charlemagne, an often-overlooked current in early medieval thought, to look at how the contours of the relationship between East and West moved across centuries, particularly in the period leading up to the First Crusade.

Genres: History, Medieval, Nonfiction, Medieval History

215 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 24, 2011

About the author

Matthew Gabriele is a Professor of Medieval Studies and Chair of the Dept. of Religion & Culture at Virginia Tech.

His research and teaching focus on religion, violence, nostalgia, and apocalypse (in various combinations), whether manifested in the Middle Ages or modern world. This includes events and ideas such as the Crusades, the so-called “Terrors of the Year 1000,” and medieval religious and political life more generally. He also has presented and published on modern medievalism, such as recent white supremacist appropriations of the Middle Ages and pop culture phenomena like Game of Thrones or video games.

He has published several books and numerous articles. He also has presented at dozens of national and international conferences and has given talks at Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Virginia, the University of Minnesota, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, the University of Kent, and Nottingham Trent University. In 2010, he was a visiting researcher at Westfälische Wilhelms Üniversität-Münster, and from 2016-19 he was an elected Councilor of the Medieval Academy of America.

His public writing has appeared in such places as The Washington Post, Time, Forbes, and The Daily Beast. Interviews with him have aired locally, nationally, and internationally. He is currently a columnist for Smithsonian Magazine.

He's the author, with David M. Perry, of The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe (Harper, 2021), and also Oathbreakers: The Civil War that Ended and Empire and Made Europe (Harper, 2024).

Reviews

[Anatolikon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book argues that Charlemagne’s empire quickly grew into legend and was used as such to speak about sacred history. Through the legends of Charlemagne the Franks gain an identity and come to believe themselves to be actors in an eschatological struggle for a grand mythical empire that included the terrestrial Jerusalem. These ideas eventually became so ingrained in the elite Frankish mindset that Urban II was able to use them despite never directly invoking them to call the First Crusade.

[Marie]

read for grad school

[Steven Muhlberger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of dense, but has some exciting ideas about Frankish identity.

[Mills College Library]

940.14 G1187 2011