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215 Edward Peters 14  Another Canonist Heard From Gervase of Tilbury’s Kaiserspiegel for Otto IV Between 1211 and 1214, Gervase of Tilbury, the widely travelled English polymath, jurist, collector of mirabilia, and marshal of the imperial aula at Arles, found himself in a three-sided dilemma. One side was Innocent III, a pope whom Gervase perhaps knew, but in any case greatly admired and respected. Another was Gervase’s loyalty to his patron, the recently excommunicated and therefore deposed Emperor Otto IV (r. 1209–11), to whom Gervase may have been distantly related through the Plantagenets and who had appointed Gervase marshal of the kingdom of Arles in 1209. The third was Gervase’s more professional interest as a canonist about the relations between papal and imperial powers, a subject recently heightened for political thinkers and jurists by the long dispute between Frederick Barbarossa and Alexander III (the outcome of which Gervase had personally witnessed at Venice in 1177). The political consequences of the sudden death of Henry VI in September 1197 and the subsequent decade-long Thronstreit between Philip of Swabia and Otto of Brunswick constituted another difficulty, as did the dispute between Innocent III and Otto in 1210–11. Gervase’s dilemma may be traced through parts of his vast Otia imperialia (or Solacium imperatoris), which Gervase dedicated to Otto IV in 1215 to amuse and instruct Otto’s imperial (or post-imperial) leisure.1 The Otia Earlier versions of this essay were given as talks at the International Medieval Conference at Leeds in 2006 and the New College Conference in Sarasota in 2008. I am grateful for the comments of several participants and others, particularly Armin Wolf, Jonathan Shepard, and James Blythe. It is an honor to offer this study as a tribute to my friend of nearly half a century, Bob Somerville. May he consider it very minimal Otia academica or a Solacium Roberti! 1. Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor, ed. and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford 2002), hereafter cited as Otia. All translations are from Banks and Binns. 216  Edward Peters is generally known for the articulated moral geography and history found in the second of its three sections, decisio II (sometimes too readily dismissed as merely potted Peter Comestor and Orosius) and the mirabilia of the known and unknown world in decisio III. This last part of his work was often detached and excerpted from the rest of the Otia, translated into European vernaculars and studied, usually as high-end folklore and wonderliterature in the manner of Walter Map and Gerald of Wales. Many of the events in Gervase’s life and some of his interests in mirabilia are reflected in the distorting, fun-house mirror of Umberto Eco’s Baudolino. But Gervase also provided a substantial amount of direct and often quite specific advice to Otto IV on how (and how not) to be an emperor, advice that is irregularly distributed throughout his vast work and appears in different and sometimes surprising places, often without warning, in one instance (III. 103) as a personal letter to Otto directly from God (to which I will return at the end of this essay)! Some of that advice is the conventional Christian morality of the genre of Fürstenspiegel, but more of it is also sharp and Otto- (and early thirteenth-century empire/papacy-) specific , probably written and added to the earlier parts of the Otia in the crucial years 1211–14. Gervase was only briefly and indifferently considered by Wilhelm Berges in his classic 1938 study of Fürstenspiegeln. But Gervase clearly and explicitly addressed a particular emperor in particular circumstances , not just any imperial ruler, and particularly the nature of the western empire and that emperor’s relations with the pope.2 So I will consider some of his advice, cagily wrapped in a recreation, as a Kaiserspiegel, a mirror for a particular emperor in particular circumstances. Gervase (b. ca. 1160) had long associated with and entertained the powerful.3 Long ago, he states in the preface, he had made a Liber facetiarum (most likely a book of courtly conduct) for Henry the Young King (d. 1183; the work is now lost), and he then planned another, ‘in recognition of his kindness’ (Otia, Preface).4 Gervase’s description of that second book 2. Wilhelm Berges, Die Fürstenspiegel des hohen und späten Mittelalters (Leipzig 1938) 105. 3. On Gervase’s life, Otia, xxv–xxxviii...

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