CHARLEMAGNE LEGENDS. Innumerable legends soon gathered round the memory of the great emperor. He was repre sented as a warrior performing superhuman feats, as a ruler dis pensing perfect justice, and even as a martyr suffering for the faith. It was confidently believed towards the close of the loth cen tury that he had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem ; and, as in the case of many other great rulers, it was reported that he was only sleeping to awake in the hour of his country's need. The legendary Charlemagne and his warriors were endowed with the great deeds of earlier kings and heroes of the Frankish kingdom, for the ro mancers were not troubled by considerations of chronology. National traditions extending over centuries were grouped round Charlemagne, his father Pippin, and his son Louis. The history of Charles Martel especially was absorbed in the Charlemagne legend. But if Charles's name was associated with the heroism of his predecessors he was credited with equal readiness with the weaknesses of his successors. In the histories of the wars with his vassals he is often little more than a tyrannical dotard, who is made to submit to gross insult. This picture of affairs is drawn from later times, and the sympathies of the poet are gen erally with the rebels against the monarchy.
Charlemagne's wars in Italy, Spain and Saxony formed part of the common epic material, and there are references to his wars against the Slays; but especially he remained in the popular mind as the great champion of Christianity against the creed of Moham med. In 1164 Charles was canonized; yet this gave him no real claim to saintship, but his festival was observed in some places until comparatively recent times. Charlemagne was endowed with the good and bad qualities of the epic king, and as in the case of Agamemnon and Arthur, his exploits paled beside those of his chief warriors. These were not originally known as the peers famous in later Carolingian romance. The peers numbered 12 most probably by analogy with the 12 Apostles. The lists of them are very various, but all include the names of Roland and Oliver. The chief heroes who fought Charlemagne's battles were Roland; Ganelon, afterwards the traitor ; Turpin, the fighting archbishop of Reims; Duke Naimes of Bavaria, the wise counsellor who is al ways on the side of justice; Ogier the Dane, the hero of a whole series of romances; and Guillaume of Toulouse, the defender of Narbonne.
The defeat of Roncesvalles, which so deeply impressed the pop ular mind, has not a corresponding importance in real history. But it chanced to find as its exponent a poet whose genius established in the Chanson de Roland (see ROLAND, LEGEND OF) a model for his successors, and definitely fixed the type of later heroic poems. The other early chansons to which reference is made in Roland are Aspremont, Enfances Ogier, Guiteclin, Balan, relating to Charlemagne's wars in Italy and Saxony. Basin or Carl et Ele gast (preserved in Dutch and Icelandic), the Pelerinage de Charle magne and Le Couronnement Looys also belong to the heroic period. The purely fictitious and romantic tales added to the per sonal history of Charlemagne and his warriors in the 13th century are inferior in manner, and belong to the decadence of romance. The old tales, very much distorted in the 15th century prose versions, were to undergo still further degradation in 18th century compilations.
According to Berte aus grans pies, in the 13th century remanie ment of the Brabantine trouvere Adenet le Roi, Charlemagne was the son of Pippin and of Berte, the daughter of Flore and Blanche fleur, king and queen of Hungary. Mainet (12th century) and the kindred poems in German and Italian relate the enfances (youth ful exploits) of Charlemagne. He delivered Rome from the besieg ing Saracens, and returned to France in triumph. But his wife Galienne, daughter of Galafre, whom he had converted to the Christian faith, died on her way to rejoin him. Charlemagne then made an expedition to Italy (Enfances Ogier in the Venetian Charlemagne, and the first part of the Chevalerie Ogier de Dan nemarche by Raimbert of Paris, 12th century) to raise the siege of Rome, which was besieged by the Saracen emir Corsuble. Aspremont (12th century) describes a fictitious campaign against the Saracen King Agolant in Calabria, and is chiefly devoted to the enfances of Roland. The wars of Charlemagne with his vassals are described in Girart de Roussillon, Renaut de Montauban, Huon de Bordeaux, and in the latter part of the Chevalerie Ogier, which belong properly to the cycle connected with Doon of Mayence. The legend of the pilgrimage of Charlemagne to the Holy Sepulchre probably originated in a desire to authenticate the relics in the abbey of Saint Denis, supposed to have been brought to Aix by Charlemagne, and is preserved in a 12th-century romance, Le Pelerinage de Charlemagne. The legend of the conquest of Ar morica is preserved in Aiquin (12th century). La destruction de Rome is a 13th-century version of the older chanson of the emir Balan, who collected an army in Spain and sailed to Rome. The defenders were overpowered and the city destroyed before the advent of Charlemagne, who, however, avenged the disaster by a great battle in Spain. The romance of Fierabras (13th century) was one of the most popular in the 15th century, and by later additions came to have pretensions to be a complete history of Charlemagne. Otinel (13th century) is also pure fiction. L'Entree en Espagne, preserved in a 14th-century Italian compilation, relates the beginning of the Spanish War, the siege of Pampeluna, and the legendary combat of Roland with Ferragus. Charlemagne's march on Saragossa, and the capture of Huesca, Barcelona and Girone, gave rise to La Prise de Pampelune (i4th century, based on a lost chanson) ; and Gui de Bourgogne (12th century) tells how the children of the barons, after appointing Guy as king of France, set out to find and rescue their fathers, who are represented as having been fighting in Spain for 27 years. The Chanson de Roland re lates the historic defeat of Roncesvalles on Aug. 15, 778, and forms the very crown of the whole Carolingian legend. The two 13th-century romances, Gaidon and Anseis de Carthage, contain a purely fictitious account of the end of the war in Spain, and of the establishment of a Frankish kingdom under the rule of Anseis. Charlemagne was recalled from Spain by the news of the outbreak of the Saxons. The contest between Charlemagne and Widukind (Guiteclin) offered abundant epic material. Unfortunately the original Guiteclin is lost, but the legend is preserved in Les Saisnes (c. 1300) of Jehan Bodel, which is largely occupied by the loves of Baudouin and Sibille, the wife of Guiteclin. The adventures of Blanchefleur, wife of Charlemagne, form a variation of the com mon tale of the innocent wife falsely accused, and are told in Macaire and in the extant fragments of La Reine Sibille (14th cen tury) . After the conquest of the Saracens and the Saxons, the defeat of the Northmen, and the suppression of the feudal revolts, the emperor abdicated in favour of his son Louis (Le Couronne ment Looys, 12th century). Charles's harangue to his son is in the best tradition of epic romance. The memory of Roncesvalles haunts him on his death-bed, and at the moment of death he has a vision of Roland.
The mythic element is practically lacking in the French legends, but in Germany some part of the Odin myth was associated with Charles's name. The constellation of the Great Bear, generally associated with Odin, is Karlswagen in German, and Charles's Wain in English. There were mediaeval chroniclers who did not fear to assert that Charles rose from the dead to take part in the Crusades. In the ms. Annales S. Stephani Frisingenses (15th cen tury), which formerly belonged to the abbey of Weihenstephan, and is now at Munich, the childhood of Charlemagne is practically the same as that of many mythic heroes. This work, generally known as the chronicle of Weihenstephan, gives among other leg ends a curious history of the emperor's passion for a dead woman, caused by a charm given to Charles by a serpent to whom he had rendered justice. The charm was finally dropped into a well at Aix, which thenceforward became Charles's favourite residence. The story of Roland's birth from the union of Charles with his sister Gilles, also found in German and Scandinavian versions, has abundant parallels in mythology, and was probably transferred from mythology to Charlemagne.
The Latin chronicle, wrongly ascribed to Turpin (Tilpinus), bishop of Reims from 753 to Boo, was in reality composed by a Frenchman between 114o and 115o. Alberic Trium Fontium, a monk of the Cistercian monastery of Trois Fontanes in the diocese of Chalons, embodied much poetical fiction in his chronicle (c. 1249). A large section of the Chronique rimee (c. 1243) of Philippe Mousket is devoted to Charlemagne's exploits. At the be ginning of the i4th century Girard of Amiens made a dull com pilation known as Charlemagne from the chansons de gests, au thentic history and the pseudo-Turpin. La Conqueste que fit le grand roi Charlemaigne es Espaignes (pr. 1486) is the same work as the prose compilation of Fierabras (pr. 1478), and Caxton's Lyf of Charles the Grete The Charlemagne legend was fully developed in Italy, where it was to have later a great poetic development at the hands of Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso. There are two important Italian com pilations, ms. XIII. of the library of St. Mark, Venice (c. 5200), and the Reali di Francia (c. 140o) of a Florentine writer, Andrea da Barberino (b. 1370), edited by G. Vandelli (Bologna, 1892). The six books of this work are rivalled in importance by the ten branches of the Norse Karlamagnus saga, written under the reign of Haakon V. This forms a consecutive legendary history of Charles, and is apparently based on earlier versions of the French Charlemagne poems than those which we possess. It thus furnishes a guide to the older forms of stories, and moreover preserves the substance of others which have not survived in their French form. A popular abridgement, the Keiser Karl Magnus Kronike (pr. Malmo, 1534), drawn up in Danish, serves in some cases to com plete the earlier work. The 2,000 lines of the German Kaiser chronik on the history of Charlemagne belong to the first half of the 12th century, and were perhaps the work of Conrad, the poet of the Ruolantes Liet. The German poet known as the Stricker used the same sources as the author of the chronicle of Weihen stephan for his Karl (c. 123o). The earliest important Spanish version was the Chronica Hispaniae (c. 1284) of Rodrigo de Toledo.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-The most important works on the Charlemagne Bibliography.-The most important works on the Charlemagne cycle of romance are J. Bedier, Les legendes epiques (4 vol., 1908-13) and La Chanson de Roland (1927), and for the German legend, vol. iii. of H. F. Massmann's ed. of the Kaiserchronik (Quedlinburg, 54) . The English Charlemagne Romances were edited (extra series) for the Early Eng. Text Soc. by Sidney J. Herrtage, Emil Hausknecht, Octavia Richardson and Sidney Lee (5879-81), the romance of Duke Huon of Bordeaux containing a general account of the cycle by Sidney Lee ; the Karlamagnussaga, by C. R. Unger (Christiania, 186o) , see also G. Paris in Bibl. de l'Ecole des Chartes (1864-65) . For individual chansons see L. Gautier, Les Epopees francaises (new ed. 1919 etc.) and J. Bedier, op. cit., to which the following should be added: A. Thomas, L'Entree d'Espagne (Societe des Anciens Textes Francais, 1913) ; L. Brandin, La Chanson d'Aspremont (1923-24), and Sir Otuel, ed. S. J. Herrtage (E.E.T.S., 188o) . For the Carolingian romances relating to Roland, see ROLAND; Les Saisnes, ed. F. Michel (1839) ; The Sege of Melaine, introductory to Otinel, preserved in English only (ed. E.E.T.S., 5880) ; Simon de Pouille, analysis in Epop. fr. (iii. pp. 346 seq.) ; Voyage de C. a Jerusalem, ed. E. Koschwitz (Heilbronn, 1879). For the chronicle of the Pseudo-Turpin, see an edition by Castets (Paris, 1881) for the "Societe des langues romanes," and J. Bedier in Legendes epiques, t. iii. The Spanish versions of Carolingian legends are studied by Mile. y Fontanals, De la poesia heroico-popular castellana (Barcelona, 1874)• (L. B.)