“Get to know the feeling of liberation and relief.”

Belgium was the antechamber of Charlemagne’s imperial palace—or so wrote Henri Pirenne, who was eager to defend his little country. I thought about Pirenne after reading this Economist editorial, which calls for Belgium’s peaceful dissolution:

A recent glance at the Low Countries revealed that, nearly three months after its latest general election, Belgium was still without a new government. It may have acquired one by now. But, if so, will anyone notice? And, if not, will anyone mind? Even the Belgians appear indifferent. And what they think of the government they may well think of the country. If Belgium did not already exist, would anyone nowadays take the trouble to invent it?

The anonymous editorialist tries to hit all the highlights of Belgian history:

Belgium industrialised fast; grabbed a large part of Africa and ruled it particularly rapaciously; was itself invaded and occupied by Germany, not once but twice; and then cleverly secured the headquarters of what is now the European Union. Along the way it produced Magritte, Simenon, Tintin, the saxophone and a lot of chocolate. Also frites.

Despite The Economist‘s irreverent tone, I was sorry to see that Pirenne wasn’t included on their list. Henri Pirenne belonged to the first generation of Belgian scholars to professionalize the study of history; he was central to promoting the study of social and economic history; and seven decades after his death, medievalists still debate his theories about the growth of towns and the effects of Islamic expansion on Europe.

Even so, talk of Belgium’s dissolution makes me remember not Pirenne the medievalist but Pirenne the Belgian citizen, a fellow whose scholarly work is best understood by acknowledging the extent to which his life and the life of his nation were often one and the same. When Germany invaded Belgium during World War I, Pirenne’s son Pierre died fighting for his country. Pirenne himself refused to re-open his university as a pro-German institution; he was imprisoned for 31 months. In one concentration camp, where he was the only civilian among officers from four nations, Pirenne lectured on medieval history; later, in a civilian camp, he helped to open a school. After the war, he returned to his work with a distaste for all things German—while never ceasing to cultivate a certain pleasant, persistent optimism.

A French-speaking Walloon, Pirenne married a woman who was half-Walloon, half-Flemish; together they had four children. Their family reflected the Belgian national motto, l’union fait la force, a unity that Pirenne honored, and implicitly advocated, in his massive, seven-volume Histoire de Belgique. He denied writing the series out of national pride: “I have written a history of Belgium as I would have written a history of the Etruscans,” he insisted, “without reason of sentiment or of patriotism.”

In public lectures and in print, Pirenne rejected German arguments that racial heterogeneity and the lack of a common language made Belgium “une nation artificielle”; he also answered critics among his own countrymen who advocated Walloon or Flemish secession. In his Histoire de Belgique, Pirenne described a modern nation that had emerged from medieval antecedents, and he argued that the Walloons and the Flemish were united through shared historic, economic, religious, and cultural experiences. Belgian history, he claimed, was a microcosm of European history and a product of peaceful collaboration, a point he stressed at an awards ceremony in 1912:

To the contrary, and thanks to the variety of its influences and its place at the most sensitive spot in Europe, [Belgium] presents the spectacle of liberal, welcoming, confident and generous activity, in which is found the best of what we Walloons and Flemish have produced together.

Critics of the Histoire de Belgique complained that Pirenne lingered over cases of Walloon-Flemish collaboration but downplayed, even ignored, conflicts between the two groups. Those conflicts were always more relevant, and more open, than he was inclined to admit. Although Henri Pirenne was a hero, celebrated in street names, honored with statues, and later commemorated on a postage stamp, the Belgian government stopped short of giving him a state funeral in 1935. Officials fretted that national honors at the Palais de Academies would be seen as an affront to the Flemish—the sort of awkward incident that Pirenne was likely to pass over in silence.

Both halves of Belgium are increasingly keen on going their separate ways. I’m no pundit, and I can’t fake an interest in Belgian politics, but if an amicable split occurs, I may feel wistful, if only on behalf of Henri Pirenne. With a peculiar, dispassionate patriotism, he argued for the existence of a civilisation belge. Come what may, his life will be proof that it existed.

“So we go inside, and we gravely read the stones…”

Henry Adams was fond of statues. His 1904 book Mont Saint Michel and Chartres opens with Michael the Archangel “[s]tanding on the summit of the tower that crowned his church, wings upspread, sword uplifted, the devil crawling beneath, and the cock, symbol of eternal vigilance, perched on his mailed foot.” Later, when Adams notes a depiction of the Virgin Mary at the great cathedral of Chartres, he takes gentle, vicarious pleasure in imagining the twelfth-century mindset behind it:

The Empress Mary is receiving you at her portal, and whether you are an impertinent child, or a foolish old peasant-woman, or an insolent prince, or a more insolent tourist, she receives you with the same dignity; in fact, she probably sees very little difference between you.

Throughout Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, Adams plays the genial tour guide for his reader, whom he cheekily casts as his own wide-eyed niece. While the other faces of Henry Adams—novelist, academic, part-time Washingtonian, scion of a great political family—are shrouded by the author himself in the interest of efficient tourism, Adams the medievalist is a chipper fellow indeed. Faced with profundity, he is effusive, reactive, opposed to every pedantry. “To overload the memory with dates is the vice of every schoolmaster and the passion of every second-rate scholar,” he informs us. “Tourists want as few dates as possible; what they want is poetry.”

More than a century after its publication, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres is still a charming, imminently quotable work, an account of what happened when one of the sharper minds of late 19th-century America beheld the marvels of medieval France. I don’t know how well known the book is today, or how well regarded it is by scholars; I imagine it’s quite out of date. I do know that here in Washington, the influence of Henry Adams is most evident not at our cathedrals or in medieval history courses, but in a man-made grove at Rock Creek Cemetery—where, as Adams predicted, tourists seek poetry in a statue.

The tale of the statue is simple enough. Adams commissioned his friend Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create it in 1886, one year after his wife, Marian Adams, committed suicide. The larger structure later served as a tomb for both Marian and Henry Adams after the latter died in 1918, but the bronze figure became a tourist attraction even before Adams had seen it for himself. According to his third-person quasi-autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, he hurried to the cemetery in 1892, as soon as he returned from Europe.

For readers who clung to the coat-tails of the avuncular tour guide of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, the Henry Adams who visits Rock Creek Cemetery is unusually brooding and curt:

Naturally every detail interested him; every line; every touch of the artist; every change of light and shade; every point of relation; every possible doubt of St. Gaudens’ correction of taste or feeling; so that, as the spring approached, he was apt to stop there often to see what the figure had to tell him that was new; but, in all that it had to say, he never once thought of questioning what it meant.

Adams lets his reader infer the awkwardness of chatting with strangers who sought out the tomb of his wife:

As Adams sat there, numbers of people came, for the figure seemed to have become a tourist fashion, and all wanted to know its meaning. Most took it for a portrait-statue, and the remnant were vacant-minded in the absence of a personal guide. None felt what would have been a nursery instinct in a Hindu baby or a Japanese jinrickshaw-runner. The only exceptions were the clergy, who taught a lesson even deeper. One after another brought companions there, and, apparently fascinated by their own reflection, broke out passionately against the expression they felt in the figure of despair, of atheism, of denial. Like the others, the priest saw only what he brought. Like all great artists, St. Gaudens held up the mirror and no more.

Tourists to Rock Creek Cemetery still react in such strangely personal ways. During my visit there last weekend, I met a couple who had passed a few moments of sunny contemplation on the bench before the statue.

“She’s so beautiful,” the wife informed me. “She looks so hopeful—like she’s ready to cast off her shroud and fly.” When I told her about the suicide of Marian Adams, she seemed more bemused than troubled, reluctant to complicate her aesthetic experience with any newfound knowledge. Having cheerfully glanced into Saint-Gaudens’ mirror, she departed with an empty smile.

What did Adams see when he visited the cemetery? In the Education, he claims that the statue represented “the oldest idea known to human thought,” but his reader learns quickly to look past his loftier claims. The Education ignores the suicide of Marian Adams; in fact, it skips past twenty years, omitting the marriage entirely. Inclined to be silent rather than confess to sadness, Adams allows only traces of feeling to show. Perhaps his truest thoughts are better found elsewhere—in his defense of Norman architecture, for example, which, taken Adams-like and somewhat out of context, can be read as a case for the statue itself:

Young people rarely enjoy it . . . No doubt they are right, since they are young: but men and women who have lived long and are tired,—who want rest,—who have done with aspirations and ambition,—whose life has been a broken arch—feel this repose and self-restraint as they feel nothing else.

In his writing, Adams is an enigma: impressively learned, improbably modest, and always a little removed. He wanted that figure at Rock Creek Cemetery to be just as difficult to read—but each time he saw her, he hoped to discover something new. His books, although brilliant, will never reveal what he learned. To find the answer, you have to go: visit Rock Creek, sit across from that shrouded figure, and let her tell you about Henry Adams—not about his writing, wry and worldly and burning with praise for the archangel and the empress, but about the author and husband who finally ran out of words, and who counted on secrets that only a statue can tell.

“…to leave you there by yourself, chained to fate.”

If you stroll along Massachusetts Avenue looking for inspiration on the day before school starts, you’ll encounter this figure at the Embassy of Croatia.

It’s Saint Jerome, who’s immersed in his work. If you’ve ever grappled with Jerome’s page-length Latin sentences, you’ve probably made this gesture, too.

For many of you, the coming weeks will call for much sighing and staring at tomes. Whether you’re a teacher or a student, here’s to a pleasant and productive semester—and not too much hieronymian clutching of the forehead.

“Hey there, laddie, internal exile…”

Like the rubble of Dinas Emrys raining down on Vortigern’s hapless masons, the barrage of books that purport to reveal the history behind the Arthurian legends still falls with some regularity on the just, the unjust, and the just plain uninterested.

This time, at least there’s a quirky twist: according to a new book, Merlin—yes, that Merlin—wasn’t merely a scholar from Scotland; he was also a resident of Glasgow from the year 600 until 618—and he lived on what’s now Ardery Street.

Local pride, dubious use of sources—the debate, quondam et futurus, continues, as Glaswegian conflicts do. Over at The Scotsman, the comments on the Merlin story became so heated that the editors had to shut them down. For now, I’ll stay neutral, but tonight, over dinner, I’ll honor the newly discovered McMerlin with an entree that also has its mythic roots in Glasgow. For all I know, King Arthur and Merlin invented it. Which, I can hear someone thinking, is a fine idea for a book…

“Walking in the park, dreaming of a spark…”

On a dull day in Washington, when the weather is dangerously hot, what better way to pass the afternoon than to look for medieval people at Meridian Hill Park, one of the city’s grandest public places?

Climb to the source of the waterfall, and there she is, disarmed but not discouraged: la pucelle d’Orleans.

The pedestal sports a rather enthusiastic inscription:

“A most bodacious soldier and general, Miss Of Arc totally rousted the English from France. Then she turned this dude, the dauphin, into a king. And all this by the time she was seventeen!”

Wander into another corner of the park, and—non mi sembra vero!

It’s the Big D himself.

But wait…who’s that personage of historical significance seated behind those trees?

Aha! It’s that indispensable touchstone for all medievalists…

President James Buchanan!

“With his long, red beard, and his sister’s weird…”

If April is the month when longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, then maybe August is the month that priketh bloggers new in hir corages. Here are some neat blogs by medievalists: two new ones, and a third I’ve only now discovered.

At Per Omnia Saecula, grad student Jennifer Lynn Jordan plans to blog about Prester John, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Dante—and not just Rossetti, either, but also the Big D himself. Her interest in medieval bestiaries has already turned up one amusing discovery: the bonnacon, a creature whose primary defensive tactic, while repulsive, is not uncommon among humans here in latter-day D.C.

Michael Livingston, who teaches medieval lit at The Citadel, also has a new blog, where he answers the nagging question, “what would the sci-fi novel Old Man’s War sound like if Chaucer had written it?” If that question hasn’t nagged at you, then you may wish to keep your opinion to yourself; unlike most people who study and write about the Middle Ages, Livingston gerte him with a gode brond.

Not new—but new to me—is Jonathan Jarrett’s blog, A Corner of Tenth Century Europe, a site that combines Cambridge, coinage, and Carolingian Catalonia. It’s definitely the sort of blog that will teach you something—if you’re willing to C’s the day.

“But you, you’re not allowed, you’re uninvited…”

When you’re looking for him, Charlemagne is everywhere—but in April, he was noticeably absent from the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. EU member countries sponsored essay-writing and postcard-design contests for children, and museums in Brussels celebrated such curiously low-key phenomena as comic strips and photographs of offices in Luxembourg. The whole business was impressively stuffy—making Europe seem boring required an act of unprecedented bureaucratic genius—but I was still surprised when the party planners didn’t extend an invitation to Charlemagne, neither the very un-modern Christian warlord nor the burnished symbol of European unity whose name graces both a prestigious annual prize and the EU headquarters building in Brussels.

That’s why I was intrigued to see Jeffery Hodges, the Gypsy Scholar, pointing his readers to an essay, “Will ‘Europe’ Survive the 21st Century? A Meditation on the 50th anniversary of the European Community.” Its author, Walter A. McDougall, directs the International Relations program at UPenn. McDougall offers some thoughts on demography, demilitarization, and religion, subjects that merit ongoing debate—but he also remembers his Charlemagne:

What would Charlemagne make of Europe today? He would marvel, of course, at the wealth and technology. He would praise and bless the ubiquitous peace. He would recognize instantly the Islamic Challenge and tell Europeans it was ten times worse back in his day! Nor, having been a state builder himself, would he likely object to the intrusive EU bureaucracy. Indeed, it is fetching to think Charlemagne would discern in the EU the culmination of the great work he began over a millennium ago, and give glory to God. But three features of Europe today would doubtless grieve and trouble him greatly: military impotence; spiritual emptiness; and demographic decay. How long, the Emperor would surely ask, can a civilization expect to survive without arms, without faith, without children?

That is a question even the plodding Eurocrats will have to address before the twenty-first century gets very old.

What would Charlemagne make of Europe today? In the past year, several people have asked me that question. Not being built for punditry, I’ve mostly demurred, but after some informed guesswork, I came to the same mixed conclusion McDougall did: that Charlemagne would be astonished by Europe’s material prosperity but dismayed by European secularism.

That answer makes no one happy. Many want Charlemagne to be their like-minded hero, a flawless symbol of their own beliefs, while others bristle if you merely acknowledge that the question of religious faith is the largest philosophical chasm that separates Aachen in 797 from Brussels in 2007.

Fortunately, McDougall doesn’t make Charlemagne a simple repository for his own views, nor is his Charlemagne ideologically predictable. In fact, his claim that the emperor might have appreciated the EU’s sprawling bureaucracy, while plausible, is sure to rankle most of his Euroskeptic readers.

More debatable is McDougall’s assessment of the “Islamic Challenge,” his name for several intertwined issues: European identity, Muslim immigration, Islamic terrorism, and Turkish membership in the EU. Charlemagne “would recognize instantly the Islamic Challenge and tell Europeans it was ten times worse back in his day,” McDougall insists, but he offers no assurance that the situations are analogous across 1,200 years. History buffs remember that Charlemagne and his army were ambushed in the Pyrenees while leaving Spain in 778, but not everyone remembers why he was there in the first place: he had been invited to help the Muslim rulers of Saragossa and Barcelona against another Muslim, Abd al-Rahman of Cordoba. Later, Charlemagne also conducted cordial, long-distance diplomacy with the caliph in Baghdad, a consequence of their two empires having enemies in common.

The pragmatism of Franco-Islamic relations doesn’t mean that Charlemagne practiced “religious tolerance” in the modern sense—his foray into Spain was probably intended as a prelude to more ambitious military adventures—but it does suggest that if the old boy were to awaken from his 1,200-year slumber, he’d need a lengthy briefing to understand why immigration and assimilation had replaced military and diplomatic engagement as Europe’s real “Islamic Challenge.” It’s plausible, but not a given, that the events of the eighth and ninth centuries are akin to the situation in 2007, although the brave soul who argues the comparison is bound to disappoint everyone. Fans of cameras-and-handshakes diplomacy will cringe at Charlemagne’s aggressive militarism, while those who idolize him as an uncompromising proto-Crusader will find him insufficiently zealous in his opposition to the very existence of Islam.

But, as it turns out, sic semper Karolus. The most enjoyable part of my recent effort to introduce readers to Charlemagne as Karl, King of the Franks, has been witnessing the modern version of the centuries-old habit of creating a Charlemagne for all seasons. We play up favorite strengths, we prune those pesky weaknesses, and we see in him our highly personalized embodiment of an ideal Europe—whatever we think that may be.

Of course, some of us are completely, totally, utterly, infallibly immune to such anachronistic thinking. For that reason, I can admit that I know in my bones that Charlemagne, a famous patron of literature and art, would have grimaced at the sight of Europe’s monstrously tacky 50th anniversary logo. I mean, really, just look at it. The “Father of Europe” wouldn’t have needed knowledge of 21st-century typography or decades of bombardment by modern commercial branding techniques. Tasteful and discerning, he’d recognize a cheesy design when he saw one.

As for evidence of this humble assertion? Well, that’s the thing: You, dear readers, will just have to stretch your imaginations. Acknowledge the mindsets of medieval people; remember the premises of modern pundits; and take the matter, as they all so often do, on faith.

“He met the gazes, observed the spaces…”

It’s a pleasantly medieval Monday around the Web. Here are a few links for your reading pleasure…

At Studenda Mira, Dave ponders nomads, then and now.

Scott at Unlocked Wordhoard is reading the 1970s Beowulf comic books so you don’t have to. How bad are they? A sample: “Again, let’s say I buy that their alien spacecraft is crashing over Atlantis…”

Iceland Review Online presents photos and an audio tour of a reconstructed marketplace that was mentioned in the sagas.

News For Medievalists highlights a Sunday Telegraph review of a new Charlemagne novel.

Giving new meaning to the term “starving artist,” Wil at Moyen Age is trying out a medieval diet.

Mary Kate at Old English in New York catches Christopher Hitchens slighting Anglo-Saxonists.

Matthew at Modern Medieval meets the gaze of Otto III.

Thanks, as always, for stopping by! More to come later in the week…

“He couldn’t quite explain it, they’d always just gone there…”

Ignatius J. Reilly may not be back at his post, but my spies in New Orleans have alerted me to two Ignatius sightings in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

The first, a letter to the editor, remembers the meeting between Thelma Toole and the recently deceased Tom Snyder:

When that amazing novel was drawing attention from readers all over the world, Mrs. Toole flew with a friend, Joel Fletcher, to New York one morning and flew back that night—like Ignatius Reilly, unwilling to spend more time out of her native city. As Ignatius proclaimed, “Out there is the heart of darkness.”

She bantered and flirted with Snyder, who repeatedly called her “Mrs. O’Toole.” They joked about their Irishness and discussed the novel that had made her son posthumously famous. I’m not sure Snyder, who probably expected to interview some sedate elderly lady, was prepared for the phenomenon that was Thelma Toole on her mission to keep the memory of her son and his work before the public.

The other sighting occurs in this article about the Church of St. Henry, where the church, the pastor, the deacon, and the custodian are all named Henry. Unsurprisingly, this “confederacy of Henrys” is the church that convinced Ignatius to stop attending mass. The parish, the reporter tells us, is “as New Orleans as it gets.”

Can the return of Ignatius to Canal Street be far behind? Stay tuned…

“Flying birds, excellent birds…”

When you keep an eye on the media for references to Charlemagne, the results are sometimes peculiar—for example, this recent leadership profile in, of all places, Investor’s Business Daily—but even I didn’t expect to find Charlemagne in a preview of a video game based on the Lego version of Indiana Jones.

But there he is, mentioned by a writer who lists the scenes he hopes will be included in an Indiana Jones Lego video game:

A favourite funny moment from The Last Crusade… Indiana and his father, Professor Henry Jones, are in a car being chased by a couple of German aeroplanes and end up crashing on a beach. One plane turns through the air and bears down on the hapless pair. Professor Jones suddenly opens up his umbrella, flaps it around and starts clucking like a chicken while advancing on birds on the sand.

Indy looks at him as if he’s saying, ‘WTF?’, but the birds are scared into flight and the plane collides with the flock and crashes and burns. “I suddenly remembered my Charlemagne”, says Professor Jones. “Let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky…” What a guy.

The line attributed to Charlemagne by Sean Connery’s character has proven to be remarkably durable. It’s a favorite epigram on quotation sites, .sig files, and MySpace pages, and Wikipedia cites it as an example of Charlemagne’s “cultural significance.”

I’ve never seen any evidence that Charlemagne actually said it.

Granted, I haven’t read every word written about Charlemagne, nor have I read every romance, chanson, or miscellaneous fragment of the Matter of France. However, I have read everything that an inquisitive screenwriter with a Charlemagne fixation might have encountered, such as sources translated into English. But the line cited by Dr. Henry Jones, Sr., isn’t in Einhard or Notker; it isn’t in any of the commonly republished capitularies, annals, or letters; it’s not in The Song of Roland or in popular translations of the Italian Charlemagne stories; and it’s not in the main American source for modern, fictionalized Charlemagniana: Bulfinch’s Legends of Charlemagne.

Furthermore, the line doesn’t even appear in major literary and historical sources that would have been unfamiliar to most non-scholars when the movie was made in 1989. “The Battle of the Birds,” a political allegory by Theodulf of Orleans, sounds like the first place to look, doesn’t it? But Theodulf wrote his poem three years after Charlemagne’s death, and while he does liken flocks of birds to warring armies, he doesn’t much dwell on the rocks and the trees. The Visio Wettini, in which Walahfrid Strabo recounts the deathbed visions of his mentor, also seems like a likely source for philosophical musings, but even though Walahfrid does include a vision of Charlemagne in Hell, the emperor is too busy having his genitals eaten by an animal to utter anything as lovely as the line from the film.

More pedantically, the line quoted by the elder Dr. Jones is a dubious thing for the real Charlemagne to have said. According to Bernard Bachrach, the Carolingian army drew on a pool of approximately 2 million men between the ages of 15 and 55. They had inherited late Roman military tactics, the troops were well trained, and morale was high. Despite the wise observations his scholars sometimes attributed to him, Charlemagne had no pressing reason, beyond accounting for the role of topography and weather in military planning, to speculate about nature either as an aid to military power or as a peaceful, metaphysical alternative to it.

But those aren’t the only plausible readings of the pseudo-Carolingian quote. It might be the cry of a Luddite, the sigh of a nature lover, or the reassuring mantra of a pacifist. It might also be the credo of a Christian warlord who wants God’s creation to be his ally—or who fervently believes that it already is.

In the movie, the bemused reaction of Indiana Jones to the bird episode suggests that we’re meant to see his father’s literal enactment of the line as surprising, even ironic, as if its original context were more solemn or noble. Adding to the allure of the quote is its meter: it’s a pentameter line, but the final four feet are anapests; that many anapests signal formal poetic intentions to the ear of an English speaker. Finally, by attributing the quote to a medieval figure whose name is synonymous with legend—or whose French name is at least a euphonious enigma—the screenwriter cleverly evokes a mystical past while hinting at credible history behind lots of implausible fantasy. By seeming to allude to religion, nature, legend, and poetry, this little line plays right into modern assumptions about things medieval. It seems authentic, even if it’s not.

For centuries, medieval storytellers used Charlemagne to evoke a mythic past, and while it’s fittingly medieval of their modern counterparts to do the same by citing sources that never existed—just like Sir Thomas Malory claiming that “the Freynsh booke makyth mencion” of something that the French book maketh no such mention of at all—I find it charming that the Indiana Jones screenwriter wound up inventing the only Charlemagne “quote” that most people are likely to remember.

A few years ago, someone on the Mediev-L listserv asked about this elusive quote. The list archive is offline, but I do remember that the question stumped the scholars who responded. Dr. Jones’s pseudo-scholarly quip may have a genuine source; if so, I’d be pleased if a sharp-eyed scholar could come along to render this blog post obsolete.

In the meantime, I can easily see why a plausible but spurious reference to Charlemagne by an elderly, fictional medievalist has intrigued and enamored so many. Before 1989, this lyrical line didn’t mean anything to anyone, so today you can say it—let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky—and evoke a universe of medieval mystery, while really saying nothing at all.

[January 12, 2008: I posted an update of sorts here.]

[November 30, 2025: With the recent death of Tom Stoppard, people have been discussing his role as an uncredited script doctor for “Last Crusade.” Could he have added this line to the script? Perhaps a Stoppard scholar might offer a clue or two.]