3. - Performing Sacrality: The Liturgical Portrait of Frederick Barbarossa's Charlemagne

Summary

CHARLEMAGNE'S English adviser, Alcuin of York (d. 804), is a figure instrumental in shaping Carolingian perceptions of kingship, warfare and sanctity. In his poem The Bishops, Kings and Saints of York Alcuin devotes more than 250 lines of verse to describing the deeds of the king and martyr Oswald of Northumbria (d. 642) – the most poetic space of any one figure in the narrative. Alcuin's account of the king's early military victories communicates an important facet of Oswald's persona:

So Oswald's army overpowered and annihilated its enemy, leaving the battlefield behind it in rivers of blood until the wicked Cadwallon himself fell, paying the price for his treachery, dying amid the massacre of his men, and yielding a brilliant victory to that splendid king.

Not merely a victorious king in battle, Oswald is also a fiercely brutal and emphatic conqueror of his enemy. Alcuin relishes describing Oswald's unrestrained violence, in spite of the king's sanctity. However, wholesale promotion of secular force represents a moral problem to the Church. Alcuin immediately qualifies the above description with the following:

His enemies slain, the holy Oswald entered his realm, a worthy heir of its ancient line: a man of mighty virtue, guardian and lover of the fatherland, following Christ's commands with outstanding character; generous to the poor, self-denying, but unstinting to all, true in his judgments, kindly and pious of spirit, of signal distinction but humbly tempered, terrible to his enemies but genial to each of his friends, as invincible in war as he was scrupulous to maintain peace treaties.

These qualifications rein in and circumscribe Oswald's cold-blooded brutality. Describing Oswald's movement from the battlefield back into his fatherland underscores the king's return to performing a different set of virtues. When not on the battlefield, Oswald dedicates his prowess to embodying Christian values. The attributes Alcuin assigns Oswald, themselves dependent upon and elaborated from Bede's original account, represent core values Christian kings were expected to demonstrate in their comportment. This emphasis on the virtues of the militant king is significant given Alcuin's close relationship to Charlemagne. The liturgies written for the canonization of King Louis IX of France (1297) testify to the permanence of these values in continental thought. The yearly commemoration of St Louis casts him as enjoying many of the same moral qualities found in Alcuin's description of Oswald.