[65] Theodosius the Great was born in Spain about 346 and died in 395. Though he was under the influence of Ambrose, bishop of Milan; and though the bishops humiliated him and once compelled him to do penance for the period of eight months, his reign was one of great splendor, and the last year of his life he was sole emperor.
[66] It was in the winter of 1804–5 that the fiasco of Boulogne occurred.
[67] “The emperor celebrated the birth of our Lord at Aachen.”
[68] The city of Ravenna; which is situated between the Ronco and the Lamone rivers.
[69] He absolutely refused to take medicines, and when ill his only treatment was abstaining from food. See also [p. 304]:—“According to his usual custom he thought to subdue the fever by fasting.”
[70] Louis deserved the surname “Pious” so far as his care for the morals of his people was concerned. At the beginning of his reign he earnestly attacked the abuses that prevailed. At court he suppressed licentiousness and punished the nobility who had abused their authority. He also tried to reform the clergy. Seeking to establish the order of succession, he associated his oldest son, Lothair, with himself in the government, and gave to his two younger sons, Pippin and Louis, portions of the empire. His wife, however, died, and he marrying again became the father of a fourth son. Upon this he revised his plans of the partition of the empire. The three older sons rebelled, and took their father prisoner in the year 833, but in the following year he was reinstated by his son Louis. Again in 838 Louis was involved in a dispute with his sons, but he died (840) while the question was in process of arbitration. “He had capacities which might have made him a great churchman, but as a secular ruler he lacked prudence and vigor, and his management prepared the way for the destruction of the empire established by his father.”
[71] A curious and somewhat difficult question arises as to the disposal of the remains of the great emperor. This account rests on the authority of Einhard, and is fully confirmed by Thegan the biographer of Louis the Pious. But in the year 1000 the Emperor Otho III. opened the tomb in the presence of two bishops, and a knight named Otho of Lomello, and according to the statement of that knight communicated to the author of the chronicle of Novalese, they found the emperor sitting on a throne, with a golden crown on his head, and holding a golden sceptre in his hands. The hands were covered with gloves, through which the nails protruding had worked their way. A little chapel (tuguriolum) of marble and lime was erected over him, through the roof of which the excavators made their way. None of the emperor’s limbs had rotted away, but a little piece had fallen from the end of the nose, which Otho caused to be replaced in gold. The four discoverers fell on their knees before the majestic figure. Then they clothed him with white robes, cut the finger nails, took away one tooth as a relic, closed the roof of the chapel and departed.
The account is a very circumstantial one, and is given by a contemporary chronicler on the authority of one of the actors of the scene who is a fairly well-known historical personage. Yet most modern inquirers accept the conclusion advocated by Theodor Lindner (Die Fabel von der Bestattung Karls des Grossen), that the story must be rejected as untrue, in other words, that Otho of Lomello in relating it was playing on the credulity of his hearers. The chief reasons for this conclusion are, that the story is hopelessly at variance with the statements of Einhard and Thegan. If the body was buried on the very day of death, there would be no time for the elaborate process of embalming which this story requires. The words of the epitaph “humatum,” “sub hoc conditorio situm est,” would not be applicable to such a mode of interment. Moreover, such a very unusual mode of dealing with the great emperor’s body would surely have attracted some notice from the ninth-century authors who in prose and verse celebrate the deeds of Charles, not one of whom makes the slightest allusion to it. Lastly, though an industrious search has been often made, no one has ever been able to find a trace of the tuguriolum (necessarily a room of a certain size) in which the corpse was said to have been seated.
In 1165, at the time of the canonization of Charles, his body was taken up by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, removed from the marble sarcophagus, in which it had lain for nearly 352 years, and placed in a wooden coffer in the middle of the church. For this wooden coffer was substituted fifty years later, at the order of Frederick II., a costly shrine, adorned with gold and jewels, in which at the present day, every six years, the relics of “St. Charles the Great,” are exhibited to the people. The head is separated from the body and enclosed in a silver portrait-bust of fourteenth-century workmanship.