Among all the treasures kept at the episcopal palace of Tau in Reims, there is one whose romantic destiny, associated with four emperors, would be likely to ignite the imagination of a novelist since it is a reliquary, said “Charlemagne’s Talisman”. A recent gemological analysis coupled with historical research offers new insight into this exceptional gem.
If rare articles, mainly from the 19th century, have dealt with some historical aspects of the reliquary, no gemological analysis had been carried out before that of the scientific team in 2016, under the leadership of Professor Gérard Panzer and assisted among others by antique dealer and expert in antique jewelry Geoffrey Riondet. However, to their great surprise, the historical elements that could corroborate or not their results were limited. Our gemologists then turned into detectives to go back in time and retrace the history of the reliquary by delving into the archives. The first problem was to confirm the tradition which wanted him to be contemporary with Charlemagne.
Did it belong to Charlemagne?
The talisman consists of a gold reliquary, in the shape of a eulogy bulb, composed of two circular parts joined together by a gold band. The obverse presents a large blue cabochon set as well as nine colored stones alternating with eight pearls. This is the side that is most often represented because it reveals through a magnifying effect the fragments known as the “True Cross” mounted in the shape of a cross. At the time, the content took precedence over the container and the jewel had to preserve a much more valuable treasure: the relic.
The reverse is identical, but the central stone is an enormous 139-carat sapphire whose rusticity confirms that it is contemporary with the reliquary and originates from Ceylon. It is interesting to note that stones of this size were extremely rare before the travels of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605-1689) in the Orient who brought diamonds to Louis XIV. It therefore appears that this sapphire is one of the largest recorded in the Middle Ages.
Analyzes confirm that the reliquary is from the Carolingian period and that consequently Charlemagne could have held it in his hands. However, was it - as tradition dictates - hung around the neck of the Emperor's remains when the latter was buried in 814, in Aachen?
A first chronicle, written around 1012-1018 by Thietmar, bishop of Mersebourg, reporting the exhumation ordered in the year 1000 by Otto III, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, does not allow this to be confirmed. Otto III is said to have “taken for himself the golden cross which hung around the neck of the dead man and part of his not yet purified clothes, after which he put everything back in its place with infinite respect”. Very quickly, the chronicles breathe new grandeur into the funerals and evoke an embalmed emperor wearing imperial insignia, with a piece of the True Cross included in the diadem. However, a second exhumation, in 1165, on the occasion of the canonization of the deceased emperor, does not provide more information on the reliquary. As for the inventory of relics from the Aachen treasure, it has been lost. However, elements of this list appear in manuscripts from the 12th century preserved in Bonn and Berlin, as well as an inventory established in 1520. These documents mention a reliquary containing, not pieces of the True Cross, but hair of the Virgin. From the 17th century onwards, engravings of the reliquary appeared, as one of the relics (including the True Cross) from the Aachen treasure. In 1786, M. de Barjolé gave a more precise description in his work Lettres sur la Ville et les Eaux d'Aix-La-Chapelle as "hair of the Virgin enshrined in a golden reliquary decorated with precious stones" of the piece of the True Cross, which is listed without container.
Carrying relics on oneself was common, as attested by Alcuin, theologian and advisor to Charlemagne, who wanted to put an end to this practice. It must also be emphasized that, for a long time, the value of an oath or a legal act was closely linked to the object which designates it. It is therefore very possible that the reliquary belonged to the treasury of Aachen at the time of Charlemagne and that it was part of the regalia and insignia worn by the Emperor during official ceremonies, helping to ensure spiritual legitimacy. of his coronation by Pope Leo III.
A symbolic value that will not escape future emperors...
Napoleon, heir of Charlemagne
The Carolingian reference accompanied the entire reign of Napoleon. “I am Charlemagne, because, like Charlemagne, I unite the Crown of France with that of the Lombards,” he wrote in January 1806 to Cardinal Fesh, his ambassador in Rome, in a letter evoking the relations he wished to maintain with the Vatican. And again, in 1809, Talleyrand reported in his memoirs a scene where the Emperor lost his temper, reproaching the ecclesiastics for their independence regarding his instructions and concluding his outburst with an "I am Charlemagne, I... I am Charlemagne".
When Aachen, which became a French city, was designated in 1802 as the capital of the new Rhine department of Roer, Monsignor Berdolet occupied the episcopal see, even before receiving papal approval. Proclaimed emperor in May 1804, Napoleon began an official tour of several months during which he visited his august predecessor. Joséphine, who came to take the waters in Aachen, had been waiting for him there since the end of July. Monsignor Berdolet, who owed his appointment to Napoleon, hastened to offer the Empress some gifts, directly from the treasure: the Lukasmadonna (an icon enshrined in a reliquary), the Talisman of Charlemagne and the piece of the True Cross. A gift attested by a draft of a memoir from the bishop addressed to the Empress dated 23 Thermidor year XII (August 11, 1804) which thus evokes “a small silver-gilt reliquary garnished with the image of the Blessed Virgin, which is attributed to Saint Luke. Plus a small round reliquary in pure gold decorated with stones, the rim of which contains relics, and the large stones in the middle contain a small cross made from the wood of the holy cross. These two small reliquaries were found on the neck of Saint Charlemagne when his body was exhumed from his sepulcher in 1166, and history and tradition teach us that Charlemagne was accustomed to carrying these same relics with him in battle. » (1)
It would seem from this reading that the talisman contained at least two types of relics and that the bishop removed all or part of the contents, replacing them with the two pieces of wood presented as the True Cross, previously listed without a specific reliquary. The study of the thread that binds them, carried out in the 1960s by Bernard Gormond, indeed supports this hypothesis because this specialist in trimmings dated raw silk to the end of the 18th century at the earliest.
À partir de cette date et du don officiellement remis à Joséphine, ainsi que des journaux de l’époque (comme le Moniteur, la Gazette de France et le Journal du commerce) s’en firent l’écho, il ne fut plus question des cheveux de la Vierge et le reliquaire fut couramment désigné sous l’appellation de Talisman de Charlemagne. Napoléon séjourna à Aix-la-Chapelle du 2 au 11 septembre 1804, s’inclinant le 7 du mois sur la châsse de Charlemagne et se faisant présenter également les reliques du trésor. Si l’Empereur apprécia les cadeaux remis à son épouse, accentuant la filiation politique qu’il n’hésitait pas à revendiquer, il n’en eut la jouissance que pendant le temps de leur union. Propriété personnelle de Joséphine, elle demeura dépositaire du talisman après la dissolution du mariage en 1809.
Un symbole de l’Empire
Au décès de Joséphine, le 29 mai 1814, Hortense de Beauharnais, sa fille, hérite du talisman. À la fois belle-fille et belle-sœur de Napoléon, l'ex-reine de Hollande décrivit plus tard dans ses Mémoires (2) la manière dont le reliquaire fut acquis, contredisant ainsi les récits de 1804. Elle consolidait au passage la légende dorée de Charlemagne et se posait en gardienne de l’épopée napoléonienne.
It is this version that will spread, even if it means being further embellished under the pen of Alexandre Dumas père. The latter, on a trip to Switzerland, stopped in 1832 at Arenenberg Castle, on the shores of Lake Constance, where the queen was exiled. She invites him to admire her “imperial reliquary” and Dumas to linger at length on the most sensational object in the collection: “Then it is the talisman of Charlemagne; Now, that of this talisman is quite a story; listen to her. When the tomb in which the great emperor had been buried was opened at Aachen, they found his skeleton dressed in Roman clothes. He wore on his head his double crown of France and Germany on his withered forehead […] and on his neck hung the talisman which made him victorious. This talisman was a piece of the true cross […] enclosed in an emerald and this emerald was suspended by a chain from a large gold ring. The bourgeois of Aachen gave it to Napoleon when he entered their city and Napoleon, in 1813, playfully threw this chain around the neck of Queen Hortense, confessing to her that on the day of Austerlitz and from Wagram, he had carried it himself on his chest, as, nine hundred years ago, Charlemagne did. »
The legend of the talisman was born and with it its political value as a symbol of the Empire, destined to be reborn in the hands of Prince Louis-Napoleon. However, the reliquary narrowly escaped sale...
A reliquary within a reliquary
On her death, Queen Hortense transmitted the property of Arenenberg to Prince Louis-Napoléon, but the financial problems of the future Napoleon III condemned him to sell the castle in January 1843 and to try to transfer the reliquary to the highest bidder. The approach was not followed up, but the reliquary benefited from new publicity in the newspapers. A first article in the newspaper L'Illustration, in 1844, accompanied by an engraving, describes the talisman as "the most precious relic of Europe", accumulating all the erroneous information that has circulated since the beginning of the 19th century. Several newspapers took up the elements cited, including, the following year, the English Illustrated London News and the Austrian Allgemeine Theaterzeitung, once again drawing attention to a highly symbolic object and spreading the legend surrounding it throughout Europe.
Prince Louis-Napoléon finally became its faithful guardian and became attached to it to the point of keeping it until he died in his room, protected in a reliquary commissioned in 1855 and executed according to a drawing by the Parisian goldsmith Froment-Meurice. It was designed to also accommodate other relics including the bone of Charlemagne's right arm offered to Napoleon I. When he became emperor, Napoleon III wanted an assessment of the talisman, carried out in 1866 by Charles Clément, assistant curator at the Louvre Museum. The latter describes the reliquary in a note to which is attached an engraving by the historian Ernst Weerth as “offered by the city of Aachen with other relics to Emperor Napoleon I during the coronation. He presented it to the Empress Joséphine. On the death of the Empress, it passed to Queen Hortense, it now belongs to her grandson Napoleon. Two large sapphire cabochons, one oval, and the other square surround a cross made with wood from the real cross; we only see it on the side of the oval sapphire. It is invisible from the side of the rough cabochon. »
While the timeline of events is wrong, it is interesting that the curator lists the two central stones as sapphires. A description is otherwise consistent with newspaper articles dating back to 1844. So why does the talisman nowadays feature a glass cabochon on the obverse? The answer perhaps lies in the events which followed the fall of the Second Empire.
A talisman in exile
The fate of Charlemagne's talisman is then subject to conjecture. For Raymond Lindon, who conducted research in the town where he was mayor for around thirty years, it was hidden in Étretat, in an underground passage connecting the two houses of Gustave Baugrand, crown jeweler. For the Duke of Alba, the Empress gave the talisman to Doctor Henri Conneau, personal physician to Napoleon III who hid it in a wall of his house before managing to return it to the imperial family in England. It would be during this uncertain period, around 1870, that a glass cabochon would have been substituted for the second sapphire (emerald for Dumas père whose description is less reliable). The results of the scientific analysis support this hypothesis by demonstrating that it corresponds to a molded glass from the 19th century which does not exactly coincide with the shape of the frame (the circle in which the stone is embedded).
The talisman nonetheless remains a precious object rich in symbols which finds its place in the reliquary in the bedroom of the Emperor in exile where he died on January 9, 1873. It is identifiable in the watercolor painted by George Goodwin Kilburne's house at Chilshurst and now owned by the Compiègne Museum.
Kaiser Wilhelm II would have happily inherited the jewel, but the former Empress categorically refused his requests. She held this talisman "as the apple of her eye", having had it within her sight during the birth of her son, as she entrusted it to Maurice Paléologue according to their interviews which he published the content in 1928. Unfortunately, the ex-empress was a widow without direct descendants since the death of the prince imperial. The question of the future of the relic had tormented her since 1879.
The Empress, advised by the Abbot of Farnborough, Dom Cabrol, legally refined the donation so that neither the French government, nor the Archbishop of Reims, nor even the Holy See could remove the talisman from Reims Cathedral.
The reliquary was given to Cardinal Luçon by Dom Cabrol on November 30, 1919. A year later, the empress died in Madrid, at the home of her nephew, the Duke of Alba, leaving in her will 100,000 francs to the cathedral of Reims for its reconstruction.
Owned in 1927 by the Diocesan Association of Reims, the reliquary was classified as a historic monument in 1962. It is currently exhibited at the Palais du Tau.
(1) Quoted in Friedrich Lohmann, Die Lösung der Frage über die Verluste des Aachener Domschatzes in französischer Zeit, in ZAGV 46, 1924.
(2) Memoirs of Queen Hortense, published by Prince Napoléon, volume I, 1834.
Hortense’s testimony
“My mother went to take the waters in Aachen. […] The Emperor, upon his arrival in this city, was received there with the greatest enthusiasm. We were grateful to him for having brought back the relics, which since Charlemagne, had made the glory of Aix-la-Chapelle. The chapter and the city believed they could not better demonstrate their gratitude than by offering to the one they regarded as a new Charlemagne an object which had belonged to their glorious founder. It was a talisman that Charlemagne always carried with him in battle and which was still found on his collar when his tomb was opened […]. My mother wanted to add to the offering a bone from Charlemagne's arm which is kept in a hunt, a small sculpted figure of the Virgin which is considered to be a work of Saint Luke. […] I still have all these objects. »
Eugénie’s legacy in Reims
As she explained to Maurice Paléologue, “many times, under one pretext or another, the archbishop of Cologne and the chapter of Aix-la-Chapelle had begged me to return it to the Carolingian treasure: I was stubbornly refused. Then, I thought of giving it, during my lifetime, to Pope Leo XIII, in memory of Pope Leo III, by whom Charles was crowned emperor, in the Basilica of Saint Peter, in front of the tomb of the Apostles, on Christmas night 800… But I reflected that, sooner or later, the people of Cologne and Aachen would obtain from some complacent pope the restitution of the jewel; because, in strict law, theologically, no prescription operates on relics... I therefore remained very perplexed when the war of 1914 occurred. The horror that the bombardment of Reims caused me suddenly enlightened me. One fine morning, I exclaimed: “It is in Reims that I will bequeath the Talisman of Charlemagne, and this will be the punishment of the barbarians!” »
Queen Hortense, carrying the reliquary. Instead of the chain we know today, the reliquary is connected to several elements including two ovals decorated with gems and a cape clasp. Although clothing clasps were commonly used in the 18th and 19th centuries to replace buttons, these elements were probably born from the artist's imagination.
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