The Book of Emperors: A Translation of the Middle High German Kaiserchronik

Introduction

1 Introduction 1. The Book of Emperors and its Treatment of History the Book of Emperors is the first history of the Roman Empire of any sort written in the West since antiquity and the first attempt at a world or universal history in any Western vernacular language. It assumes that world history funnels naturally enough into Roman history, and it makes no distinction between the ancient Roman Empire that fell in the West in AD 476, the Carolingian Empire inaugurated well over three centuries later, and its Germanic revival, still known in the English-speaking world as the Holy Roman Empire, which dates from the tenth century. On the contrary, it seems consciously to obliterate these distinctions, in order to show the contemporary empire of the mid-twelfth century as having a millennium-long history all of one piece. Its author was an anonymous monk in Regensburg, Bavaria, who took up the monumental task of setting down in German the whole story of the Roman Empire, including a bit of Biblical and ancient Greek background, as he thought it worthwhile for laymen to know. He seems to have written his work between 1152 and 1155, at least no later than 1165. Since his narrative stops short in describing events of 1147, he came quite close to making good on his stated intention of bringing his account “down to this very day for anyone who wants to listen.”1 More than eight centuries later, we are quite familiar with the genre called popular history. The academic eye, upon catching the writer in the act of using questionable methods to hold the interest of non-scholarly readers, easily distinguishes the work from its entirely serious counterpart. 1. Line 20. This and subsequent line citations are to the Middle High German text edited by Edward Schröder as Die Kaiserchronik eines Regensburger Geistlichen for the MGH series Deutsche Chroniken I (Frankfurt: Weidmann 1892; repr. WBG, 1964 and 1969). 2 Introduction The popular historian might be guilty of presenting doubtful hypotheses as assumed facts, inserting bits of dialogue between historical personages that could not possibly have been recorded, or even of introducing a composite or made-up character or two. The genre often features gratuitous scenes of sex and violence designed to catch the attention of the reader. Popular history is so much a part of our world today that we may realize only with some difficulty that it is part of our medieval heritage, emerging as a general European phenomenon in the twelfth century, when a variety of writers took history out of the monastery and introduced it to a much broader public than before. Geoffrey of Monmouth, although he kept one foot within the older tradition by writing in Latin, felt no hesitation in using myth, legend, or any type of handy and reasonably credible fiction in order to gain wider popularity for his History of the Deeds of the Kings of England, completed about 1147. Just a bit later, Henry II patronized the Anglo-Norman poet, Master Wace, and made him canon of Bayeux for writing his highly fanciful Roman de Rou, a poetic history in French of Rollo and the Dukes of Normandy. Still, no other author undertook a vernacular world or imperial history before our Regensburg cleric, who used foundation stones of imperial reigns found in Latin annals on which to erect a superstructure derived from popular legends, epics, and the anecdotal sermon material aimed at lay audiences. The Book of Emperors has a huge variety of sources. With regard to its imperial scope in presenting vernacular stories of emperors over a thousand-year period, however, it has no surviving predecessors.2 2. A work that shows some of the same characteristics is the half-century earlier Song of Bishop Anno (Annolied) a vernacular, verse saint’s life but with a long introduction of world and Roman history, which is obviously intended to interest a lay audience. Our author in fact adapted some of that introduction into his own. The Annolied, however, jumps directly from the founding of Metz, Trier and Cologne in the days of Augustus Caesar to the story of Saint Anno bishop of Cologne (died 1075). It is probably the initial work of popular history in a tradition continuous from the Middle Ages but apart from its introduction it is not a world or imperial history. Henry A. Myers “The Origin of Popular History in Twelfth-Century Germany,” Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. X (1977...