Visio Karoli Magni
Encyclopedia
The Visio Karoli Magni full title Visio Domini Karoli Regis Francorvm ("Vision of the Lord Charles, King of the Franks"), is an anonymous East Frankish piece of Carolingian Renaissance
Carolingian Renaissance
In the history of ideas the Carolingian Renaissance stands out as a period of intellectual and cultural revival in Europe occurring from the late eighth century, in the generation of Alcuin, to the 9th century, and the generation of Heiric of Auxerre, with the peak of the activities coordinated...

 visionary literature. Written in Latin about the year 865, the Visio is not typical medieval Christian visionary literature, for the vision is merely a dream.

Textual transmission

The Visio is preserved in only two manuscripts, both of the twelfth century. One is kept in the Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek in Frankfurt am Main in MS Barth. 67, folios 131r–132r. The other is in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Bibliothèque nationale de France
The is the National Library of France, located in Paris. It is intended to be the repository of all that is published in France. The current president of the library is Bruno Racine.-History:...

 in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, where it is MS lat. 5016, folios 159v–169v.

The first modern edition of the poem, in 1837, was by the German scholar Eberhard Gottlieb Graff
Eberhard Gottlieb Graff
Eberhard Gottlieb Graff was a German philologist. He was born at Elbing, Prussia, and was educated at Königsberg, where he became professor of the German language in 1824...

, based on the Frankfurt manuscript alone. Jean-François Gadan published an edition in his Collection du bibliophile troyen: recueil de pièces concernant la ville de Troyes ou conservées dans sa bibliothèque (Troyes, 1851), but this was based solely on the Paris manuscript. Philippe Jaffé provided the first modern edition based on both manuscripts, in the Bibliotheca rerum Germanicarum, volume IV (Berlin, 1867), pages 700–704. Only a few years later a German, Heinrich Gottfried Gengler, provided a second edition from both manuscripts in the Germanische Rechtsdenkmäler (Erlangen, 1875). The most recent edition was made in 1981 by Patrick Geary from the Frankfurt manuscript with alternative readings from the Parisian. He presented it at the end of his paper "Germanic Tradition and Royal Ideology in the Ninth Century: The Visio Karoli Magni".

Story

The Visio relates an apocryphal story about Charlemagne
Charlemagne
Charlemagne was King of the Franks from 768 and Emperor of the Romans from 800 to his death in 814. He expanded the Frankish kingdom into an empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy and was crowned by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800...

, who was said to keep a lamp and writing utensils bedside, so that he might write down anything recollected from his dreams that was worth remembering. One night, in a dream, the emperor was approached by one bearing a sword. When asked about his identity the swordbearer only warned the emperor to heed the words engraved (litteris exarata) on the blade of the sword, for they were a prophecy that would come true. There were four words, seemingly of Germanic
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...

 origin, engraved on the blade, from the hilt to the tip they were: RAHT, RADOLEIBA, NASG, and ENTI. Charlemagne immediately recorded all of it on his tablets.

The next morning Charlemagne was discussing the dream with his befuddled advisors when one of them, "wiser than the others", Einhard
Einhard
Einhard was a Frankish scholar and courtier. Einhard was a dedicated servant of Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious; his main work is a biography of Charlemagne, the Vita Karoli Magni, "one of the most precious literary bequests of the early Middle Ages."-Public life:Einhard was from the eastern...

, in fact Charlemagne's biographer, said that the one who had given the sword would explain its meaning. Charlemagne himself then begins to interpret it: the sword is the (military) power he has from God, RAHT meant abundance beyond what his parents enoyed, RADOLEIBA meant that his sons will share less abundance than he, NASG meant that they will be greedy and oppressive towards the Church, and ENTI meant simply "the end".

The anonymous author asserts that he received the story from Rabanus Maurus
Rabanus Maurus
Rabanus Maurus Magnentius , also known as Hrabanus or Rhabanus, was a Frankish Benedictine monk, the archbishop of Mainz in Germany and a theologian. He was the author of the encyclopaedia De rerum naturis . He also wrote treatises on education and grammar and commentaries on the Bible...

, who told it widely after rising to the Archbishopric of Mainz
Archbishopric of Mainz
The Archbishopric of Mainz or Electorate of Mainz was an influential ecclesiastic and secular prince-bishopric in the Holy Roman Empire between 780–82 and 1802. In the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, the Archbishop of Mainz was the primas Germaniae, the substitute of the Pope north of the Alps...

. Rabanus was said to have heard it from Einhard, who had it from the mouth of Charlemagne. The author then explains how the prophecy of the sword has come true: during the reign of Charlemagne's son Louis the Pious
Louis the Pious
Louis the Pious , also called the Fair, and the Debonaire, was the King of Aquitaine from 781. He was also King of the Franks and co-Emperor with his father, Charlemagne, from 813...

 the Bretons and Slavs revolted, after Louis's death the kingdom was torn by civil war
Civil war
A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same nation state or republic, or, less commonly, between two countries created from a formerly-united nation state....

 as his sons Lothair
Lothair I
Lothair I or Lothar I was the Emperor of the Romans , co-ruling with his father until 840, and the King of Bavaria , Italy and Middle Francia...

, Pepin
Pepin II of Aquitaine
Pepin II, called the Younger , was King of Aquitaine from 838 as the successor upon the death of his father, Pepin I. Pepin II was eldest son of Pepin I and Ingeltrude, daughter of Theodobert, count of Madrie...

 (actually a grandson), and Louis the German fought for support among the nobility, Pepin and Lothair usurped the property of monsteries in Aquitaine
Aquitaine
Aquitaine , archaic Guyenne/Guienne , is one of the 27 regions of France, in the south-western part of metropolitan France, along the Atlantic Ocean and the Pyrenees mountain range on the border with Spain. It comprises the 5 departments of Dordogne, :Lot et Garonne, :Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Landes...

 and Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 respectively, and the bishops of the Church had sent a letter with Witgar begging Louis to make peace throughout the realm. This letter, the author claims, is preserved in the church of Saint Martin in Mainz
Mainz Cathedral
Mainz Cathedral or St. Martin's Cathedral is located near the historical center and pedestrianized market square of the city of Mainz, Germany...

.

Analysis

The origins of the story were a mystery for a long time, but it now seems clear that it can be associated with the reign of Louis the German
Louis the German
Louis the German , also known as Louis II or Louis the Bavarian, was a grandson of Charlemagne and the third son of the succeeding Frankish Emperor Louis the Pious and his first wife, Ermengarde of Hesbaye.He received the appellation 'Germanicus' shortly after his death in recognition of the fact...

 and with the city and church of Mainz
Mainz
Mainz under the Holy Roman Empire, and previously was a Roman fort city which commanded the west bank of the Rhine and formed part of the northernmost frontier of the Roman Empire...

. The Frankfurt manuscript was probably copied at Mainz, and the anonymous author of the text may have been a cleric at the local church. The Paris manuscript may be from the church of Saint Afra
Saint Afra
Saint Afra was a Christian martyr. Her actual existence is not mentioned until the 5th century martyrologies, giving her dubious historicity.-Biography:...

 in Augsburg
Augsburg
Augsburg is a city in the south-west of Bavaria, Germany. It is a university town and home of the Regierungsbezirk Schwaben and the Bezirk Schwaben. Augsburg is an urban district and home to the institutions of the Landkreis Augsburg. It is, as of 2008, the third-largest city in Bavaria with a...

. Witgar was the bishop of Augsburg
Bishop of Augsburg
The Bishop of Augsburg is the Ordinary of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Augsburg in the Ecclesiastical province of München und Freising.The diocese covers an area of 13,250 km².The current bishop is Konrad Zdarsa who was appointed in 2010....

 from 858 to 875 and Charles, brother of the aforementioned Pepin, was the archbishop of Mainz from 856 until 866. Since the Visio attacks the policies of Lothair and Pepin and extols the virtue of Louis the German, it was probably written during the episcopate of Pepin's brother and sometime after the letter of Witgar, probably around 865.

The vision itself is probably to be connected to Charlemagne's palace at Nieder-Ingelheim in the Maingau, which in the fourteenth century was his purported birthplace and which the Emperor Charles IV (1354) referred to as the place where his predecessor received from an angel a sword. All this might suggest the survival of the legend of the vision in the region around Mainz even as its popularity as literature was low everywhere else.

Dieter Geuenich has argued that the presentation of a story revolving around the interpretation of Germanic words would have been well-received at the court of Louis the German, who sought to "cultivate" the theodisca lingua (German language). The Visio can be seen as a piece of the propaganda of a consciously developed East Frankish (aristocratic) culture that patronised the Germanic language. Louis the German is presented as the superior of the his relatives from elsewhere in Christendom; East Francia is the last refuge of the Church.

Sources

  • Geary, Patrick J. (1987). "Germanic Tradition and Royal Ideology in the Ninth Century: The Visio Karoli Magni." Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 21: 274–294. Reprinted in Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. ISBN 0 801 48098 1.
  • Lewis, Andrew W. (1981). Royal Succession in Capetian France: Studies on Familial Order and the State. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0 674 77985 1.
  • MacLean, Simon (2003). Kingship and Politics in the Late Ninth Century: Charles the Fat and the end of the Carolingian Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Müller, Stephan (2000). "Die Präsenz der Schrift zwischen Vision und Wissen: Zur Deutbarkeit der vier scheinbar deutschen Wörter in der ‚Visio Karoli Magni‘". Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, 119: 98–102.
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