They solemnly washed and tended his body, laying it in the church where it was buried amid the great grief of the whole nation. At first men doubted where he ought to rest, since he himself in his lifetime had left no directions in the matter. At last the minds of all were satisfied that nowhere could he more fitly be buried than in that church which he had built at his own cost at Aachen from his love of God and our Lord Jesus Christ and to the glory of the ever blessed Virgin his mother. Here then he was buried on the same day that he died. Above his tomb was erected a gilded monument with his effigy and title upon it. This famous title runs thus:
UNDER THIS TOMB LIES THE BODY OF
CHARLES THE GREAT AND ORTHODOX EMPEROR
WHO GLORIOUSLY ENLARGED THE REALM OF THE FRANKS AND
FORTUNATELY ORDERED THE KINGDOM FOR FORTY-SEVEN YEARS
HE HAD PASSED THE AGE OF SEVENTY WHEN HE DIED
JAN. XXVIII IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD DCCC XIIII
INDICTION VII
PORTENTS OF CHARLEMAGNE’S DEATH
There were many portents of his approaching death, for not only others, but the king himself felt them. During the whole of his last three years there were eclipses both of the sun and of the moon, and certain spots of blackish hue were seen in the sun for the space of seven days. The portico which he had built with great labour between the church and the palace fell in a sudden and complete ruin from top to bottom on the day of the ascension of our Lord.
Also the wooden bridge across the Rhine at Mainz—which it had taken the king ten years of immense labour to construct, a work so marvellous that it seemed as if it would endure forever—chanced to catch fire, and was burned to a cinder in three days, so that not a single spar remained beyond what was protected under water. Again, when the king was in Saxony on his last campaign against Godefrid, king of the Danes, one day when the march had begun and he had left the camp before sunrise, he saw fall suddenly from heaven a blazing torch that flashed through the clear sky from right to left. While all wondered what this might portend, suddenly the king’s horse fell right upon his head and hurled his rider with such violence to the ground that the pin of his mantle was broken and his sword belt burst. His attendants rushed up and loosened his armour, and with some help he was induced to rise. The javelin which he chanced to hold in his hand at the time was thrown from his grasp a distance of twenty feet or more. Nor is this all. The palace of Aachen was visited with frequent shakings, and the ceilings of the houses in which he dwelt cracked constantly. The church in which he was afterwards buried was visited by lightning, and the golden apple with which the apex of the roof was embellished was wrenched away and hurled away over the adjoining house of the priest. In this same church, on the ring of the cornice which ran round the interior of the building between the upper and lower arches, there was an inscription in red chalk relating who was the founder of the church, the last line ending with the words Karolus Princeps. It was noticed by certain persons that in the same year as that in which he died, a few months before that event, the letters spelling Princeps were so obliterated as almost to be invisible. But the king either concealed his feelings about all these warnings from on high, or else he scorned them as in no way relating to himself.
HIS WILL AND TESTAMENT
Charles intended to make a will in which he might provide to some extent for his daughters and the children he had begotten of his concubines, but he began it late and it could not be completed. Three years, however, before his death he made division of his treasures, his money, his garments, and other chattels, in the presence of his friends and of his servants, making them witnesses that after his death the distribution made by him should take effect and be ratified by their assent. What he wished to be done with each portion he set down in an abstract of which the argument and text is as follows:
A Frankish Woman of Quality
Description and division made by the most glorious and most pious prince, Charles, emperor, augustus, in the year of the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ 811, in the forty-third year of his reign in Francia, in the thirty-seventh of his reign in Italy, in the eleventh of his use of the imperial dignity, and in the fourth indiction.