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An Empire of Memory - The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem before the First Crusade (Hardcover)
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An Empire of Memory - The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem before the First Crusade (Hardcover)
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Beginning shortly after Charlemagne's death in 814, the inhabitants
of his historical empire looked back upon his reign and saw in it
an exemplar of Christian universality - Christendom. They mapped
contemporary Christendom onto the past and so, during the ninth,
tenth, and eleventh centuries, the borders of his empire grew with
each retelling, almost always including the Christian East.
Although the pull of Jerusalem on the West seems to have been
strong during the eleventh century, it had a more limited effect on
the Charlemagne legend. Instead, the legend grew during this period
because of a peculiar fusion of ideas, carried forward from the
ninth century but filtered through the social, cultural, and
intellectual developments of the intervening years.
Paradoxically, Charlemagne became less important to the Charlemagne
legend. The legend became a story about the Frankish people, who
believed they had held God's favour under Charlemagne and held out
hope that they could one day reclaim their special place in sacred
history. Indeed, popular versions of the Last Emperor legend, which
spoke of a great ruler who would reunite Christendom in preparation
for the last battle between good and evil, promised just this to
the Franks. Ideas of empire, identity, and Christian religious
violence were potent reagents. The mixture of these ideas could
remind men of their Frankishness and move them, for example, to
take up arms, march to the East, and reclaim their place as
defenders of the faith during the First Crusade.
An Empire of Memory uses the legend of Charlemagne, an
often-overlooked current in early medieval thought, to look at how
the contours of the relationship between East and West moved across
centuries, particularly in the period leading up to the First
Crusade.
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