The Kaiserchronik, likely completed in Regensburg around 1150, is a seminal work.Footnote 1 Monumental in scale, it comprises over seventeen thousand lines of Middle High German verse and is the first verse chronicle in any European language. Through a grand narrative of the reigns of thirty-six Roman and nineteen German emperors over a timespan of twelve centuries, it throws a spotlight on ethnicity, religion, and cultural identity, as well as on the relationship between church and empire, as these issues played out on the various stages of Rome, Germany, and their territorial outposts in the Mediterranean basin.Footnote 2
The Kaiserchronik has several claims to uniqueness. No other medieval chronicle focuses solely on the Roman Empire. No other German work of the period draws on such heterogeneous sources, ranging from the Mirabilia Romae, Hellenistic novels, and Ovid, to Latin historiography and oral legend.Footnote 3 None points so clearly to the complex relationship between Latin learning and popular culture in terms of its manuscript transmission, its status among clerics, and its retranslation into Latin.Footnote 4 With respect to the last feature, the only other vernacular German texts of the period that received similar treatment were the prologue to Willehalm, an adaptation by Wolfram von Eschenbach of a chanson de geste from the William of Orange cycle, and Hartmann von Aue's religious legends, Der Arme Heinrich and Gregorius.Footnote 5
At the latest count, there are fifty surviving manuscripts (including fragments and excerpts) of the Kaiserchronik. The earliest of these (Klagenfurt, Landesarchiv, Cod. GV 6/26; Vorau, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. 276) are from the last quarter of the twelfth century, and the last (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, cgm 965) is dated 1594; around two thirds of the extant transmission is from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.Footnote 6 Moreover, the manuscripts transmit three distinct versions of the chronicle, testifying to a productive engagement with the text over a long span of time.Footnote 7 Recension A (ca. 1150) and Recension B (ca. 1200) recount the history of Roman and German rulers, beginning with the foundation of Rome by Romulus and Remus and breaking off in the reign of Conrad III with his preparations for the crusade in 1147. The main innovation of Recension B is that it modernizes the language and diction of A, making rhyme and meter conform to what had become the norm for courtly narrative literature around 1200; it also abbreviates the text by around sixteen hundred lines, sometimes in a manner that is detrimental to the content and intelligibility. Recension C (ca. 1250) again updates the rhyme and meter of A, though independently of B and in a way that preserves textual content; it also adds a new prologue and continues the chronicle down to the end of the reign of Frederick II in 1250; one manuscript of the family (Leutkirch, Fürstlich Waldburg zu Zeil und Trauchburgsches Gesamtarchiv, ZAMs 30) includes a second continuation that extends the narrative of imperial history through the Interregnum and down to the year 1274.Footnote 8 It is important to note that each new recension did not supersede the older ones, which continued to be copied, and that the transmission is geographically diverse: although the surviving manuscripts are preponderantly Austro-Bavarian, the Kaiserchronik was also transmitted in southwestern and central Germany, and (via ingestion into the Sächsische Weltchronik) in the Low German-speaking regions of the north.Footnote 9
Given the multifaceted presence of the chronicle in German culture for almost half a millennium, it is remarkable that our grasp of the work and its influence is still so tenuous. Literary medievalists have neglected it because they associate it with a genre (historiography) and a period (the mid-twelfth century) that have traditionally been marginal to their interests; historians do not always have sufficient philological training to read a long text in a nonstandard version of Middle High German. Yet, vernacular texts can tell us much about medieval attitudes—popular as well as elite—about the past, and the Kaiserchronik, in particular, provides an opportunity to connect historical and literary studies in much the same way as Gabrielle Spiegel did over twenty years ago when she argued, in her study of vernacular chronicles from early thirteenth-century France, that the literary form of the chronicles (in this case prose) was as instrumental as their historical content when it came to procuring effects of historical authentication and ideological legitimation.Footnote 10
Even within the broad canons of medieval historiography, the Kaiserchronik is no ordinary history.Footnote 11 Its principle of narrative organization is admittedly regnal: the chronicle proceeds through the reigns in sequence, in every case beginning with the same formula—“The book tells us that X became ruler” (though it is not clear whether “the book” refers to a putative written source for the Kaiserchronik or to the Kaiserchronik itself, from which one must imagine a reciter reading aloud)—and ending with the length of the reign in years, months, and days. But in the Roman part, the sequence of emperors includes a fictitious ruler—Narcissus—and crass anachronisms, the most egregious of which is the placing of Tarquin the Proud, the last Roman king before the Republic, between Nero (54–68 CE) and Galba (68–69 CE) (Kaiserchronik, lines 4301–34).Footnote 12 Moreover, the chronicle-like account of the events of each reign (with an accent on wars, the persecution of Christians, and Church councils and synods) is filled out with narratives of legendary or hagiographical or literary provenance that, by modern standards of history writing, are sheer fabulation and fabrication. The narrative of the reign of Claudius, for example, has hardly anything to say about the emperor at all, focusing instead on his fictitious brother Faustinianus, who is supposedly the father of Pope Clement I. The story, which recounts the unfortunate separation through shipwreck of various members of Faustinianus's family and their subsequent miraculous reunion, is not historical but derived ultimately from the model of the Hellenistic novel, with an overlay of hagiographical accounts (sermons and vitae) of the life of Clement (lines 1115–1218).Footnote 13 Narcissus, the invented emperor, is merely a peg on which to hang the story of his equally fictitious daughter-in-law Crescentia. Her tale is a version of the popular story-type of the virtuous woman falsely accused: condemned to death twice for an offense she never committed (first adultery, then infanticide), Crescentia is rescued by God twice and endowed with the miraculous power of healing any sick person who is willing to confess his or her sins. She uses this power to cure and be reconciled with both of her accusers, whom God had punished for their transgressions by striking them down with leprosy (lines 11352–12812).Footnote 14
Legendary, hagiographical, and literary narratives are less prominent in the German part of the Kaiserchronik, but the author continues nonetheless to take great liberties with the historical facts. The narrative involves actors who are not attested in the historical record; prominent historical persons may be conflated or confused with one another; and what appear to modern eyes as salient events in German history of the early and central Middle Ages are either omitted or given only cursory treatment. For example, the divisions of Charlemagne's empire are completely unmentioned, and the outbreak of the Investiture Controversy and its resolution are dealt with entirely within the reign of Henry V (lines 16848–941); the result of this containment is that the account of Henry IV, which opens with the theme of Henry's dissolute youth before moving on to Godfrey of Bouillon's campaigns in Antioch, Jerusalem, and Babylon (lines 16532–847), leaves readers with the impression that Canossa never even happened.Footnote 15
The medieval public seems not to have had any difficulty with the Kaiserchronik's inaccurate and often idiosyncratic account of history. On the contrary, the facts of recension, transmission, and reception all suggest that the chronicle enjoyed widespread acceptance as a work that transcended distinctions between fact and fable, history and poetry, the secular and religious—distinctions that medieval audiences certainly recognized but considered secondary to other criteria (such as moral utility or religious orthodoxy) when it came to determining whether a narrative located in the historical past had a serious claim on their attention.Footnote 16 Neither the B nor the C recension of the Kaiserchronik attempts to make factual corrections to the account of Roman and German history presented in A. As far as the transmission is concerned, the surviving complete manuscripts almost always contain only the Kaiserchronik, but the small number of instances where the chronicle forms part of a larger collection of works is remarkable for its generic diversity. The Kaiserchronik appears together with Bible epics and vernacular theology in the case of Vorau, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. 276, and with saints lives in that of Prague, Národní knihovna České republiky, Cod. XXIII G 43; it keeps company with secular courtly romances and epics in Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 2779; it is transmitted with historiography in Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, cpg 154, which inserts the episodes of Theodosius and Julianus into the text of a German translation of Martin of Troppau's chronicle of popes and emperors. Finally, the fascicle containing the Kaiserchronik in the Vorau Codex was bound together with a second fascicle (copied in Vorau between 1185 and 1202) that contains Otto of Freising's Gesta Friderici imperatoris; it is unlikely that the two fascicles were originally conceived as a pair (the vernacular part may not even have been copied in Vorau), but the binding of the codex is fifteenth-century, so they must have been joined together by that time.Footnote 17
Finally, the reception of the Kaiserchronik also indicates an interest on the part of writers of both vernacular and Latin chronicles. Three manuscripts of Recension C of the Sächsische Weltchronik (Strassburg, Stadtbibliothek, no signature, destroyed 1870; Pommersfelden, Gräflich Schönbornsche Schloßbibliothek, Cod. 107, 1370; Copenhagen, Det Kongelige Bibliotek, GKS 457,2°, mid-fourteenth century) transmit texts into which some five-sixths of the A recension of the Kaiserchronik (sometimes recast from verse into prose) has been integrated.Footnote 18 A late twelfth-century manuscript of the continuation of Frutolf of Michelsberg's world chronicle by Ekkehard of Aura (Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. hist. fol. 411) includes a Latin translation of the explanation of the Roman names for the days of the week from Kaiserchronik Recension A (lines 42–234).Footnote 19
It is thus evident that the Kaiserchronik was a widely disseminated text from the time of its inception—very possibly because rather than in spite of its blend of history and fiction. What the facts of recension, transmission, and reception cannot explain, however, is the meaning that the chronicle may have had for the medieval audiences among whom it was so popular. To be more exact, they cannot tell us what compelling version of the historical past the chronicle offered to its various and evidently numerous readers and listeners. The following article focuses on the first recension (A) of the Kaiserchronik, seeking to explain some of the appeal that its version of Roman and German history may have held for the original public around the middle of the twelfth century. Drawing on insights from historians and literary scholars, it begins with the paradigm of salvation history, the model of history writing traditionally considered to be the productive matrix for the Kaiserchronik, and then situates the chronicle in the twin contexts of German vernacular literature and the writing of history as “serious entertainment” in the twelfth century. These latter contexts have not yet received the attention they merit from Kaiserchronik scholarship.
Salvation History
Research on the Kaiserchronik has been conducted primarily by literary historians, not historians. After the emphasis on rulership in sociologically driven readings of the 1950s to the 1970s (which was followed by a lull in the 1980s), research has revived somewhat, especially in the last fifteen or so years, with narratological approaches predominating, though rarely in a manner that is wholly convincing.Footnote 20 The reason is that literary scholars have tended to think of the chronicle as they would think of a work of literature, namely, as an intentional whole with an internally consistent compositional structure. This is a category error, however, in the case of the Kaiserchronik: even the most fundamental source criticism indicates that the work can only have come into being through a process of accretion, possibly carried on by more than one author over a long period of time; the process resulted, moreover, not in a finished composition imbued with a narrative design, but in an “open” work always subject, in principle, to further revisions and additions.Footnote 21
One approach among literary scholars has therefore been to analyze single, prominent episodes of the chronicle, but the resulting interpretations are then difficult to generalize. There is often a focus on longer stories that, because of their specific sources, present all the features of a well-formed, self-contained narrative (e.g., Faustinian, Silvester, and Crescentia), but the rules that can be derived from these episodes hardly hold for the others.Footnote 22 Some of the anecdotes recounted in the chronicle do not seem functional at all—for example, the story of the widow who killed her own child for food during the famine that broke out when Vespasian and Titus lay siege to Jerusalem: it is narrated at some length, but has no connection to what turns out to be the focus of the account of the sack of Jerusalem, namely, how the Jewish historian Josephus managed to save his life and write his History of the Jews (lines 909–1044). It is also difficult to make out any principle about the inclusion of narrative detail: the chronicle is capable of paying minute attention to particularities, but it is also capable of total insouciance. There is, for example, a meticulous account of how the poison that the bad emperor Galienus put into the River Tiber was detected by a physician using two dogs: he was able to locate the source precisely when the dog swimming upstream of the poison lived and the one swimming downstream died (lines 7562–83). By contrast, Emperor Constantine, who was a good ruler, appeared to be willing to allow innocent children to be put to death in the hope that their blood would provide a cure for the illness from which he was suffering; he desisted from the plan only after perceiving the distress of the children's mothers. It is impossible to tell whether this was careless motivation on the author's part, or whether he intended to depict Constantine doing something reprehensible (lines 7813–41).
There is a second, thornier problem: while literary scholars have not failed to register that the Kaiserchronik is a narrative of history, the operative model of historical narrative that they suppose is a simplistic one. They tend to assume, more or less tacitly, that the primary motivation of the chronicle's author (or authors) was a desire to make the narratable history of empire intelligible to readers by imposing on it the structure of Christian salvation history. This view goes back at least to Ernst Friedrich Ohly in his pioneering study, Sage und Legende in der Kaiserchronik, first published in 1940.Footnote 23 With only occasional exceptions, this classification has become the standard currency of literary histories and interpretations down to the present day. Gisela Vollmann-Profe characterizes the content of the Kaiserchronik as a “depiction of post-Christian salvation history.” For Walter Haug the chronicle narrates “salvation history… entirely in its eschatological dimension.”Footnote 24 Essentially the same view is put forward, though with greater nuance, in narratological studies by Otto Neudeck, who states that “the conceptual patterns of typology [and] the theory of the world monarchies are instrumentalized and modified in the Kaiserchronik,” and by Christoph Petersen, for whom the Kaiserchronik's narrative strategies allude to Christian universal history, with its basal structure of the “fulfillment-bearing return” of an “originary constellation of history.”Footnote 25
There are good reasons to question the assumption that the narrative and explanatory structures of the Kaiserchronik are pervaded through and through by models of Christian salvation history. Our skepticism on this score derives from two important aspects of salvation history: the problem of detectable patterns of divine influence on the course of human affairs, and the scheme of the four world monarchies—Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome—that often underlies narrativizations of universal history.Footnote 26 The point is not that salvation history possessed no relevance whatsoever for the author(s) and the original public of the Kaiserchronik, but rather that its role was neither structural with respect to the chronicle's composition nor wholly determinative with respect to its meaning.
Salvation history posits that God is either visibly or invisibly active in the course of human events. Late antique practitioners of Christian salvation history therefore had a salient concern with what G.W. Trompf has identified as questions arising from the presumption of a logic of retributive justice: whether there is a correlation between the moral character of humans and the success or misery they experience in this life, and whether historically documented patterns of human fortune and misfortune reveal the hand of a deity who distributes earthly punishment and reward in accordance with absolute justice.Footnote 27 Different authors in late Roman antiquity responded to these questions in different ways. For Augustine, the fact that the wicked sometimes enjoy good fortune whereas the virtuous may suffer hardship does not constitute proof that divine justice is absent from human affairs; it suggests instead that God ordains the course of history in “an order of things and times which is hidden from us, but entirely known to Him.”Footnote 28 Orosius and Sulpicius Severus sought to demonstrate, by contrast, that God metes out punishment and reward in a manner whose equity is already revealed in the course of earthly history.Footnote 29
Scholars have assumed a similar correlation for the Kaiserchronik. Ohly claimed that the fundamental compositional principle of the chronicle—its “Kompositionsgesetz”—consisted in the struggle between the cosmic forces of good and evil, with God rewarding the former and punishing the latter.Footnote 30 According to Ohly, this struggle played out in every single reign of the chronicle, at least down to Charlemagne. Furthermore, the general direction of historical travel toward its telos in the Last Days, and the inauguration of the Heavenly Kingdom, are indicated by a network of what Ohly labeled “typological” relations between pagan and Christian rulers, the former constituting the types that “prefigure” their fulfillment in the corresponding antitypes. Ohly thus interprets, for example, Vespasian's campaigns against the Babylonians (lines 5099–364) as prefiguring subsequently narrated campaigns by Heraclius and Geoffrey of Bouillon in defense of Christendom and Jerusalem against the pagans (lines 11138–351, 16618–789).Footnote 31 Ohly's application of a technique of Bible hermeneutics to a non-biblical text and to persons (typology was developed as a way of explicating the relationship between the Old and New Testaments) has received a great deal of criticism over the years.Footnote 32 It is not that aspect of his thesis that we wish to comment on here, but rather his claim that God's retributive justice is manifestly revealed in the Kaiserchronik's narrative of the events of imperial history.
Ohly claimed in his commentary that the author of Recension A followed John of Salisbury in demonstrating a correlation between the moral character of the ruler and the manner of his death: tyrants are murdered, a sure sign of divine disapproval and punishment, whereas righteous rulers are rewarded with a peaceful death resulting from illness or natural causes—a correlation that obtains for pagan and Christian rulers alike.Footnote 33 Ohly's thesis is overly tidy. What the Kaiserchronik displays, in fact, is a consistent but, by no means, exceptionless correlation between the moral character of an emperor and his eternal (but not earthly) punishment or reward. The soul of Nero—styled “the most evil man ever born of woman into this world (der aller wirste man / der von muoter in dise werlt ie bekom)” (lines 4085–86)—is thus conveyed by demons to hell (lines 4293–98); the same fate befalls Domitian (lines 5277–78), Decius (line 6450), and Julian the Apostate (line 11137), all persecutors of Christianity. By contrast, angels summon the souls of Constantine (line 10510), Narcissus (line 12812), Theodosius (line 13650), Henry II (line 16245), and others to accompany them in heaven. There is no perceptible correlation with regard to the manner of the ruler's death: exemplary ones are no less murdered than wicked ones. Tiberius, for example—said to have earned his salvation because he punished the Jews for murdering Christ—is poisoned (lines 674, 1114); Zeno, who is negatively characterized for his dereliction of duty toward Rome (lines 13828–30), conversely dies a natural death. The chronicle offers only occasional commentary when it comes to happiness or misfortune in this life in general; moreover, that commentary says nothing consistent about the theme of retributive justice. Helius Adrianus is killed in an act of divine retribution for having had the impertinence to rename Jerusalem after himself (lines 7229–30); the exile and suicide of Maximian are similarly said to be God's vengeance for his villainy (line 6620). But when Louis III, who defeats an entire army of Hungarians with God's help, falls to his death from a tower, the narrator comments in lapidary fashion on the inscrutability of God's ways: “everything happens according to God's will (aller dinge gelîch ist alsô got wil)” (line 15651). That God's involvement in human affairs is sometimes intelligible and sometimes not could, of course, be theorized into a consistent account of retributive justice by following the model of Augustine, who suggested in the City of God that divine punishment and reward are neither wholly reserved for the Last Judgment nor wholly apparent from the fortunes of individuals while they are still in this life: if the former were true, one would be obliged to admit that Christianity had not made the world in any way better, whereas if the latter held, humans would worship God purely for the sake of the material blessings he confers in this world.Footnote 34 The author of the Kaiserchronik attempts no such theorization about the distribution of blessings and misfortunes in this life: whether out of reluctance or lack of interest, this deficiency suggests that it was not the intention to narrate theologically and philosophically informed salvation history in the vernacular, but rather to produce what Dieter Kartschoke has called “exemplary narratives of a legendary and hagiographical nature.”Footnote 35 Such a classification certainly fits well with a statement in the A prologue that the purpose of the chronicle was to inform “about the popes and kings, both good and wicked, who lived before our times and ruled the Roman Empire down to the present day (von den bâbesen unt von den chunigen, / baidiu guoten unt ubelen, / die vor uns wâren / unt Rômisches rîches phlâgen / unze an disen hiutegen tac)” (lines 19–23).Footnote 36
Claims about the theological conception of history supposedly underlying the entire Kaiserchronik generally rest on a reference made in the chronicle to Daniel's dream of the four beasts that rise up from the sea (Dn 7; Kaiserchronik, lines 526–90). This prophetic dream and its exegesis laid the basis for Christian narratives of universal history as a sequence of four world monarchies, with the Roman Empire representing the fourth and last such monarchy before the end of the world. (In the most influential interpretation—that of Jerome in his late fourth-century commentary on Daniel—the monarchies are, in sequence, the Babylonian, the Persian, the Macedonian, and, finally, the Roman.)Footnote 37 The Kaiserchronik rehearses the dream and its exegesis at the point in its narrative of Roman history where Julius Caesar has defeated his adversary Pompey with the help of an army of Germans (Dutiske) and been recognized as sole and undisputed lord (herre) of Rome. The author of Recension A declares at this juncture that “in those days the things came to pass of which the prophet Daniel foretold when King Nebuchadnezzar recounted the dreams he had seen (In den zîten iz geschach / dannen der wîssage Dânîêl dâ vor sprach, / daz der kunich Nabuchodonosor sîne troume sagete / die er gesehen habete)” (lines 526–29).Footnote 38
The ensuing account and interpretation of the dream of the four beasts contain numerous idiosyncrasies.Footnote 39 First, the Kaiserchronik author conflates Daniel's dream of the ferocious beasts (Dn 7) with Nebuchadnezzar's earlier dream of the statue with feet of clay (Dn 2). Second, the order of the beasts differs from that of Daniel's dream as reported in the Old Testament: instead of a lion, bear, leopard, and unspecified ten-horned beast that Jerome identified with the destructive boar of Psalm 79:14, the Kaiserchronik has the sequence leopard, bear, boar, and lioness.Footnote 40 Third, and most important, the Roman Empire is not fourth and last in the succession of world monarchies in the Kaiserchronik, but rather third and penultimate: it is preceded by the Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great (the leopard) and by three kingdoms that fought as allies against another one (the bear, equated by Jerome with the Medes and Persians who sacked Babylon). The kingdom of the Antichrist (symbolized by the lioness with a horn reaching to the heavens) succeeds Roman rule.
Not only is this sequence of world monarchies conspicuously anachronistic (the exploits of Alexander the Great precede the warring of the Babylonians, Medes, and Persians), but it also fails to correlate with the Kaiserchronik author's own narrative of world history up to the inauguration of the Roman Empire under Julius Caesar. This history falls into two phases, but they are not the world monarchies of the dream. There is first a period known simply as “heathen times (der haiden zîten)” (line 43), when everyone worshipped unnamed, “polluted idols (abgot diu unrainen)” (line 45). Then, “after this age (nâch der werlte)” (line 50) of promiscuous idolatry, Romulus and Remus founded Rome and the seven-day week was instituted, with each day dedicated to a particular deity.Footnote 41
It follows, then, that the scheme of the four world monarchies is not structural in the sense that the sequence of kingdoms provides the chronicle with its basic framework of chronological reference.Footnote 42 Nor is the scheme thematic, by which we mean that it becomes an object of theoretical consideration—as it is, for example, for the late antique Christian historian Orosius (on whose Seven Books of History the author of the A recension of the Kaiserchronik drew), or for the author's contemporary, Otto of Freising.Footnote 43 Both of these writers gave special prominence to the first and the last monarchies in the sequence, with Orosius explaining that Rome was already rising as Babylon fell, and Otto stating that the kingdom of the Romans succeeded the kingdom of the Babylonians “as a son succeeds a father.”Footnote 44 He also assigned to the Persian and Greek kingdoms the role of “guardian” and “guide” for the infant Rome, and expended considerable energy on the translatio imperii: the theory that rulership was transferred from the Romans to the Greeks, and then from the Greeks to the Franks in continuation of the Roman Empire to the end of the world.Footnote 45 The Kaiserchronik narrates the succession of Roman, then Byzantine, then Frankish emperors, but without advancing any explicit theory of translatio imperii. With respect to Zeno, the first of the Greek emperors in the sequence of the Kaiserchronik, the author says merely that he loved his Greek kin more than the Romans, and went on a pilgrimage to Constantinople with no intention of ever returning (lines 13825–38). After the death of his successor, Constantius, the Romans decided to choose no more emperors from their own families but to elect foreigners instead (lines 14282–95); this state of affairs provided the background for the accession of Charlemagne, who was summoned by a heavenly voice to join his brother Pope Leo in Rome, where he was made king (lines 14316–81). None of these transfers of power is ever linked back to the world monarchy symbolized by the boar of Daniel's dream.
The dream and its exegesis are an isolated reference in the Kaiserchronik. That does not make them insignificant—quite the contrary, given their placement at the inauguration of Roman imperial history with Julius Caesar, whose accession is said to have been the fulfillment of the Danielic prophecy. But their significance is not as Kaiserchronik scholarship has commonly supposed. It does not follow from the fact that the author recounts and expounds the details of the dream that the narrative and explanatory structures of the chronicle are derived from the model of Christian salvation history, specifically from the scheme of the four world monarchies. Rather, it is the auratizing potential of the scheme that is exploited, i.e., its ability to confer legitimacy and cachet on certain events and persons—not its structural or explanatory possibilities. It is no coincidence that the German tribes emerged as important players on the stage of world history at the same time as Julius Caesar, who saw them as accomplices and allies. As the Kaiserchronik tells it, Caesar would not have defeated Pompey without the loyal support of the Germans, would not have become the first Roman emperor, and would not have made Daniel's prophecy come true. Through the allusion to the prophetic dream, the German tribes acquire the aura of playing an instrumental part in the course of world history from the beginning of the Roman Empire until the coming of the Antichrist.
What we are suggesting, therefore, is that the Kaiserchronik author was less interested in narrating and explaining salvation history than in exploiting the cachet of salvation history to endow the Germans with historical time-depth and significance. Moreover, the scheme of the world monarchies is merely one device among several used to promote the antiquity and historico-cultural importance of the Germans. The various German tribes are provided with a historical, a biblical, and a literary pedigree. The author repeats traditional stories claiming that the Franks were descended from the Trojans and the Bavarians from Armenia, the place where Noah's ark came to rest (lines 317–20, 346–48); the Trojan diaspora was led by Ulysses, whose men were devoured in Sicily by the Cyclops (lines 351–52); Lucretia, raped in the Kaiserchronik by Tarquin the Proud (rather than by his son, according to Ovid) is married to Conlatinus, a “prince of Trier” (line 4305).Footnote 46 Details like these make it clear that the author wanted to establish that the Germans were present not only in the historical world of the Old Testament and classical antiquity, but also in the canonical literature of that world—hence the mention of Ulysses and the Cyclops, as well as the statement (the only one of its kind in the entire chronicle) that Lucretia, the wife of a German prince, “is written in Ovid (si stât in Ovîdîô geschriben dâ)” (line 4338). In short, the Kaiserchronik's reference to the scheme of the four world monarchies should be demoted from the master-key status it has enjoyed in most scholarship and be subsumed instead under the broader category of historically and culturally legitimating devices that the author mobilizes in order to confer prestige and aura on the Germans.Footnote 47
The Production of Historical Knowledge: The German and the Northwestern European Contexts
A more nuanced understanding of the deployment of salvation historical schemata in the Kaiserchronik yields an appreciation of it as an attempt to produce a particular kind of knowledge about the German past. This production has two contexts: vernacular writing in twelfth-century Germany and the writing of history in northwestern Europe.
Around the middle of the eleventh century, the continuous production of written texts in the German language resumed after an interruption of 150 years.Footnote 48 This development marked the inception of a literary tradition that has remained unbroken to the present day. Notwithstanding its epochal significance, the large and varied corpus of vernacular literature produced during what literary historians conventionally call the Early Middle High German (MHG) period (ca.1050–ca.1170) has received less attention than the classical literature of the so-called Blütezeit that immediately followed, i.e., the period around the turn of the thirteenth century, when chivalric romances and courtly love lyrics derived from French models flourished at the courts of the secular nobility.Footnote 49 To the extent that historians of German literature have attempted an overall assessment of the earlier period (rather than just concentrating on isolated highlights), their heuristic categories, as well as their evaluative criteria, have been shaped, on the whole, by the normative influence of the Blütezeit. The result is that early MHG literature has been treated predominantly as a prelude, whose interest for literary historians is chiefly that it offers the incipient promise of developments whose fulfillment will come only in the decades after 1170: signs of authors' emancipation from theological modes of thought and religious genres, occasional flashes of awareness of literariness or even fictionality, intermittent reflections of the independent interests of a secular literary public. In general, however, the early MHG period has been characterized in terms that typically contain some kind of privative or negative prefix: the ethos of its literature is regularly said to be “pre-courtly” (vorhöfisch), the level of the authors' own reflections on their art is categorized as “pre-theoretical” (vortheoretisch), written text production is dominated by “nonfictional” modes and genres.Footnote 50 Such metaphors of incipience and deficit are inadequate, for if one takes away the unflattering comparison with the Blütezeit, the positive and epoch-making features of the earlier period are readily apparent.
There are three features, in this respect, that together form the literary-historical context of the Kaiserchronik. First, at the time when Recension A of the Kaiserchronik was being composed, there already was a critical mass of writing in the German vernacular. By the middle of the twelfth century, German had produced or (in most cases) was still producing Bible epics and exegeses; theological, moral, and natural historical literature; saints lives, sermons, and Marian lyrics; narratives of ancient history (e.g., Lamprecht's Alexander) and of Roman imperial History (Kaiserchronik; König Rother); possibly secular love lyrics (although the dating is not completely certain); and almost certainly some literary form of heroic epic in the shape of a version of the Nibelungenlied (the earliest transmitted form of which is dated to ca. 1200).Footnote 51
Second, the habit of looking forward to the 1170s and westward to France has blinded historians of medieval German literature to Germany's advanced position. In fact, as Rodney Thompson (who has argued persuasively for a reconsideration of the German lands in relation to France, England, and Italy in the twelfth century) has pointed out, “Germany stands out from the rest of Europe at this period in the volume of written vernacular literature, and the status accorded to it, even when compared with northern and southern France.” In fact, Germany was clearly outstripping France, if the surviving manuscripts of vernacular works are any indication. Whereas there are sixty-six northern French items from the twelfth century, the German tally for the same period reaches some two hundred, with another forty from the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth century. This is hardly surprising given the statistics from the period before 1100, from which only three (fragmentary) items in French survive, as opposed to forty-eight in German.Footnote 52 Contrary to the usual narrative of French dominance over German literature, the reverse is therefore apparent during this period. The genre of the Bible epic serves as one example. By the early twelfth century, German has two verse texts in the Altdeutsche Genesis and the Exodus: reworked throughout the century, their sophistication is unjustly neglected. By contrast, there is virtually no biblical literature in French (apart from prose psalters) before 1150, with the Bible not entering verse until the late twelfth century.Footnote 53
Finally, what has typically been considered a deficit—the overwhelmingly factual and functional orientation of early MHG literature, at the expense of qualities such as fictionality or literariness—may be turned to cognitive advantage. Texts from the period 1050–1170 were arguably engaged in the discursive production of a vernacular knowledge that covered a wide range of domains: theology, the Bible, history, natural history, morality, behavioral norms, and etiquette.Footnote 54 This discourse of vernacular knowledge was heavily dependent on the learned Latin tradition, yet it was not a straightforward transformation (in the guise of translation, selection, or simplification) of Latin clerical discourse; rather, it constitutes an independent corpus.
The Kaiserchronik thus emerged at a point of high productivity in a range of genres and contributed to that same productivity and diversity. The scholarship has yet to appreciate and understand the specific nature of its contribution, which lies in the vernacular's mediation of a specific view of the imperial past. Historians have pointed to a number of ways in which twelfth-century German writers used the past to deal with the uncertainty of the present—the “crisis of confidence in the twelfth-century regnum Teutonicum,” as Timothy Reuter has called it.Footnote 55 The period saw a revival of interest in Roman history and enthusiasm for the writing of local history, often with reference to the ancient world. Many German towns were believed to have been founded by Julius Caesar—Mainz, Magdeburg, Worms, and Speyer, to name only some of the most prestigious. Others, such as Augsburg and Nuremberg, claimed the pedigree of other Roman emperors, and Regensburg, as the Kaiserchronik trumpeted, drew its breath from Tiberius. Roman history had itself become increasingly important in the late eleventh century, when German rulers—in contrast to their predecessors, who had been circumspect about claiming the imperial title—began to refer to themselves as “King of the Romans” even before their coronation as emperor. There was a concomitant change in the nature of interest in ancient history, which took on a sharply political focus. And under Frederick Barbarossa in the mid-twelfth century, the significance of the pre-Constantinian Roman empire became particularly marked.Footnote 56
Other aspects of history are equally vital for a proper understanding of the Kaiserchronik. For many educated members of the elite, the past was—in Nancy F. Partner's resonant phrase—“serious entertainment”: both as a source of exemplum and as an opportunity to show off one's culture and education. History was expected to deliver “information, morality, amusement and the beauty of language,” and “to arrest the attention and divert the imagination.”Footnote 57 The black-and-white nature of the Kaiserchronik's judgments of successive emperors, along with the impressive list of sources upon which the author drew, certainly fit with this composite motivation of moral improvement and cultural capital. Reuter notes that, “in Germany, we find the invention of a mythical past intended both as a serious construction and as an entertainment in the anonymous author of the Gesta Treverorum who supplied an elaborate pre-Roman history for his city [of Trier], or in Godfrey of Viterbo, who in his works gathered together exempla drawn from every possible source he could get his hands on.” These, he observes, “may stand as counterparts to Geoffrey of Monmouth.”Footnote 58 We would like to suggest, however, that one should not only consider the Gesta Treverorum (on which the Kaiserchronik occasionally draws, as Ohly has argued) and Godfrey of Viterbo (who, in turn, draws upon Geoffrey of Monmouth) in the same breath as Geoffrey's Historia regum Britanniae (ca. 1136), but the Kaiserchronik as well.Footnote 59
Despite or perhaps because of its loose relation to sources, Geoffrey's Historia, which was dedicated to—and served the propaganda interests of—the Anglo-Norman rulership, became the most popular history written in the Middle Ages.Footnote 60 There is no simple explanation for the work's success, but certain aspects do stand out: Geoffrey “provided the unique connected account of [the] period, creating history out of pre-history; he illustrated, at a time when England was threatened with civil war, the effects of strong unified kingship; and he met current popular taste for romance, toponymic legend, prophecy, and magic.”Footnote 61 The figure of Arthur is the most striking case in point, but, in the context of the present article, it is the king's interaction with the Roman world that is particularly noteworthy. In a series of events not attested in recorded history, Geoffrey's Arthur not only defeats the Saxons and conquers the whole of Britain, but also subjugated Ireland, Norway, territories in Gaul, and a large swathe of southeastern Europe. Pitted against the Roman Empire, he even defeats General Lucius and a host of tributary rulers from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, and it is only news of his nephew Mordred's nefarious deeds at home that prevents him from pressing on and crossing the Alps.Footnote 62 “Arthur's argument for war on Rome,” Andrew Lynch argues:
is unashamedly acquisitive… In effect Geoffrey's Arthur seeks to carry off Rome's prestige back to Britain, not to fill the emperor's shoes… The thought of spoil supersedes imperial occupation and rule. The shadowy “Romanness” of the Continent provides some sense of cohesion for the lands that Geoffrey's Arthur takes over. Rome embodies what is pre-eminently desirable but the Romans are enemies; the idea is for the British to beat them, not to be them.Footnote 63
Much the same could be said, too, of Arthur's British predecessors: the brothers Belinus and Brennius, who occupied Rome (with the latter remaining to cause devastation across Italy). In these two fictitious confrontations, one before and one after Julius Caesar's invasion, Geoffrey makes the “long relationship between Britain and Rome” intrinsic to his “imposed pattern” of events and “glorif[ies] two British conquests of the Roman empire.”Footnote 64
The basic scenario in the Kaiserchronik is obviously much different. As shown earlier, unlike Geoffrey's Arthurians, the Kaiserchronik is not ashamed of wanting to be Roman, or at least as Roman as possible. At key moments, the author is keen to stress not only how the Germans took up the mantle of the Romans after imperial power was transferred, but also that they were involved in making history with the Romans all along. The interest and potential for grasping the self-understanding of European elites in distinct political contexts nonetheless lie precisely in this signal difference between these two highly popular works that emerged within decades of each other. Existing scholarship has not appreciated the full dimensions of the possible relationship between the Kaiserchronik and the Historia regum Britanniae. This is due, in Germany at least, to the influence of Ohly, who compared the Kaiserchronik with Geoffrey of Monmouth—only to assign them to opposing categories: the former to a kind of history writing that he labeled “biblical-salvation historical-imperial,” the latter to a type characterized as “mythical-legendary-national.”Footnote 65
As this brief comparison suggests, the Kaiserchronik is important for at least two reasons. In the first place, it belongs to a broader, northwestern European practice of writing history as serious entertainment; second, it casts new light on Geoffrey of Monmouth. The Kaiserchronik is indispensable for an understanding of a style of history writing that includes, among others, Wace (who finished his translation of Geoffrey into Anglo-Norman ca. 1155) and Godfrey of Viterbo (whose Liber universalis, or chronicle of world history, is from the 1180s).Footnote 66 German literature of the mid-twelfth century was thus part of a wider northern European historiographico-literary scene—and if, as John Burrow aptly notes, Geoffrey's Arthur is “a great king and commander, in the moulds of Caesar and Charlemagne, rather than the later knight errant,” then the Caesar and Charlemagne of German vernacular history must, for their part, be considered in relation to Arthur and his early manifestations.Footnote 67
More specifically, it may be possible to read the Kaiserchronik as a German response to Geoffrey of Monmouth. More work will have to be done to test and substantiate this argument, but there is certainly already enough evidence to postulate it. First, Geoffrey's history (completed ca. 1134) already became an instant success in the twelfth century, with a very wide transmission, particularly outside the British Isles. In fact, the manuscript evidence suggests that, at the height of the work's popularity, its presence on the Continent was greater than that in Britain, with Flanders, Normandy, and Champagne the main centres of interest.Footnote 68 With regard to contemporary German, it is surely significant that Godfrey of Viterbo, who was educated in Germany from 1133 before becoming a notary to Conrad III, Frederick Barbarossa, and then Henry VI, used Geoffrey of Monmouth as a source for his works, which combined saga and fable with more orthodox history to create a Trojan genealogy for the Hohenstaufen family in the 1180s.Footnote 69
Second, there were important connections throughout the twelfth century between Anglo-Norman households and Germany. Matilda, the daughter of Henry I of England, was married to Henry V, the Roman emperor and German king. She was betrothed at the age of eight and married in Mainz cathedral at the age of twelve in 1114; Henry V died in 1125.Footnote 70 When Henry I of England lost his son in the White Ship disaster of 1120, he persuaded his barons to accept Matilda as his successor. She returned to England, almost certainly bringing with her the manuscript of the Imperial Chronicle that ended up in Corpus Christi, Cambridge—a beautiful object she might have claimed from the imperial treasury in lieu of claims on her dower lands.Footnote 71 The chronicle runs from the origins of the Franks in Troy to the reign of Henry V; the codex in question portrays Matilda on her wedding day in its final illumination; and codicological evidence suggests that it was a presentation copy intended as a gift for her.Footnote 72 Matilda married Geoffrey Plantagenet, and their son King Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was a patron of the arts, specifically of Wace when he was translating Geoffrey of Monmouth. Their daughter, also named Matilda, became the second wife of Henry the Lion in 1168, and she is generally recognized as the “noble duchess, daughter of a powerful king (edele herzoginne, / aines richen chuniges barn)” who inspired the translation of the Chanson de Roland into German.Footnote 73 Matilda and Henry the Lion were forced to spend three years in exile in England beginning in 1182, and scholars have noted the distinct similarities in the style of illustrations in an early Rolandslied manuscript and the Corpus Christi Imperial Chronicle.Footnote 74 Even if our argument is necessarily suggestive—there is no positive proof that Geoffrey inspired the Kaiserchronik (or even that the Imperial Chronicle had some influence on Geoffrey)—these dynastic links and the works that thread in and out of them are a significant and enriching context in which to think about the Kaiserchronik in the future. In sum, then, the chronicle opens up new avenues and perspectives on the use of the past as entertainment and legitimation in the high Middle Ages. Future work will have to take it seriously if we are to reach a better understanding of perceptions of history among elites as they emerged across North West Europe.
Conclusion
The foregoing argues that the Kaiserchronik is an important document for getting at the way in which German-speaking elites saw themselves in history around the middle of the twelfth century. Our more nuanced approach to salvation history demonstrates more clearly how the text mediates German identity.Footnote 75 By pointing to the broader, northwestern European context of serious historical entertainment, we have also opened up new avenues of inquiry into the chronicle and, at the same time, begun to delineate a context in which authors such as Geoffrey of Monmouth might be better understood.
This article has concentrated on just Recension A of the Kaiserchronik and on its twelfth-century context, but the full critical and synoptic edition on which the authors are working (and which will be accompanied by a commentary intended to replace Ohly's) will open up longer chronological vistas.Footnote 76 For, in order to edit and elucidate a work of such extraordinary scope and longevity, it must be located in the manifold contexts that shaped its composition, rewriting, and reception from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. This is a marked departure from the usual practice of literary historians, which is to place the chronicle solely in the context of early MHG literature, when religious and historical themes predominated. Once the classical period (or Blütezeit) of chivalrous romances and courtly love lyric gets underway, the Kaiserchronik, if mentioned at all, is demoted to the status of museum piece and mere object of transmission. Yet, the ongoing reception of the chronicle throughout the Blütezeit, together with its modernizing Recension B, suggest that the new courtly genres by no means had the monopoly of innovation, and had not eclipsed the older tradition of historical narrative in the vernacular. On the contrary, from around the middle of the thirteenth century, the Kaiserchronik assumed an undisputed centrality in German textual culture, as rhymed chronicles became the productive genre of the late Middle Ages. Future research will need to examine how the three recensions of the Kaiserchronik relate to the different ideologies, structures, and techniques of the major vernacular chronicles of the mid- to late thirteenth century, such as Rudolf von Ems's Weltchronik, the anonymous Christherre-Chronik, and Jans Enikel's Weltchronik.Footnote 77 Why did this group come to eclipse the courtly romance at this stage in literary history? Such questions will also have to be pursued in relation to chronicle writing in the later Middle Ages, asking, for example, whether the Kaiserchronik served, in combination with the world chronicle of Rudolf von Ems, as a model for Heinrich von München's mammoth Weltchronik compilation in the fourteenth century.Footnote 78 We do not yet know the answers, but the fact that these questions can even be formulated testifies to the enduring productivity of the Kaiserchronik in German culture throughout the high and the late Middle Ages.
