From Charles the Great, by Thomas Hodgkin, D.C.L., London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1897; pp. 250-251.


[250]

NOTE

ON THE ENTOMBMENT OF CHARLEMAGNE

A curious and somewhat difficult question arises as to the disposal of the remains of the great emperor. The account given in the text[1] rests on the authority of Einhard, and is fully confirmed by Thegan the biographer of Louis the Pious. But in the year 1000 the Emperor Otho III. opened the tomb in the presence of two bishops, and a knight named Otho of Lomello, and according to the statement of that knight communicated to the author of the chronicle of Novalese, they found the emperor sitting on a throne with a golden crown on his head, and holding a golden sceptre in his hands. The hands were covered with gloves, through which the nails protruding had worked their way. A little chapel (tuguriolum) of marble and lime was erected over him, through the roof of which the excavators made their way. None of the emeperor's limbs had rotted away, but a little piece had fallen from the end of the nose, which Otho caused to be replaced in gold. The four discoverers fell on their knees before the majestic figure. Then they clothed him with white robes, cut the finger nails, took away one tooth as a relic, closed the roof of the chapel and departed.

This account is a very circumstantial one, and is given by a contemporary chonicler on the authority of one of actors of the scene who is a fairly well-known historical personage. Yet most modern enquirers accept the conclusion advocated by Theodor Lindner (Die Fable von der Bestattung Karls des Grossen), that the story must be 251 rejected as untrue, in other words, that Otho of Lomello in relating it was playing on the credibility of his hearers. The chief reasons for this concluson are, that the story is hopelessly at variance with the statements of Einhard and Thegan. If the body was buried on the very day of death, there would be no time for the elaborate process of embalming which this story requires. The words of the epitaph “humatum,” “sub hoc conditorio situm est,” would not be appicable to such a mode of interment. Moreover, such a very unusual mode of dealing with the great emperor's body would surely have attracted some notice from the ninth-century authors who in prose and verse celebrate the deeds of Charles, not one of whom makes the slightest allusion to it. Lastly, though an industrious search has been often made, no one has ever been able to find a trace of the tuguriolum) (necessarily a room of a certain size) in which the corpse was said to have been seated.

In 1165, at the time of the canonisation of Charles his body was taken up by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, removed from the marble sarcophagus, in which it had lain for nearly 352 years, and placed in a wooden coffer in the middle of the church. For this wooden coffer was substituted fifty years later, at the order of Frederick II., a costly shrine adorned with gold and jewels, in which at the present day, every six years, the relics of “St. Charles the Great,” are exhibited to the people. The head is separated from the body and enclosed in a silver portrait-bust of fourteenth-century workmanship.