A Byzantine Legacy in King Conrad's Court: Herakleios, Chosroes II, and Conrad III

Charles Merritt HIST 3930 Apr. 5th, 2016 Dr. Cassis I: Introduction

The Mosan cross from which this panel comes was produced under the direction of

Wibald of Stavelot, a twelfth-century abbot, diplomat, and patron of the arts who served under the crusading monarch Conrad III of Germany.1 The panel in question is one of four large images from the cross, each measuring roughly fifteen centimetres wide and seven and a half centimetres tall, and, until the cross was deconstructed, this one occupied the back of the right arm of the cross (when viewed from the front).2 It depicts the seventh-century Byzantine emperor

Herakleios triumphing over Chosroes II, a Sasanian king who had stolen the True Cross from

Jerusalem; the left-side rear panel depicts Herakleios' victorious return to Jerusalem, True Cross in hand.3

This paper argues that Wibald's cross included the image of Herakleios's defeat of

Chosroes in order to echo Conrad's own forays into Jerusalem during the Second Crusade.4

Byzantine history was used to reinforce a Crusader narrative, which speaks to the power that these historical narratives held over the medieval psyche. Furthermore, this image was likely included in order to portray Conrad's involvement in the Second Crusade in a more favourable light, despite his own failures.

1 Marie-Cécile Bardoz, “Four Plaques from the Same Cross: Christ Blessing – Saint Mark, and the Sacrifice of Abraham – Cherub, and Heraclius and Chosroes – Saint Luke, and Abraham and Melchisedech,” Department of Decorative Arts: Middle Ages, The Louvre, Paris. 2 Jannic Durand, “Au Départment des Objets d'Art du Louvre: Une Plaque Centrale de Croix Mosane du XXIIe Siècle Représentante le Christ Bénissant,” Revue du Louvre: La Revue des Musées de France 46, no. 5 (1996): 51. 3 See Appendix A. Durand, “Une Plaque Centrale de Croix Mosane,” 51, fig. 5; Marie-Lan (Jastrow) Nguyen, “Cherub and Heraclius Receiving the Submission of Khosrau II; Plaque from a Cross,” The Louvre, Paris; “Plaque de Croix: Triomphe d'Héraclius,” Musée Dobrée, Grand Patrimoine de Loire-Atlantique, Nantes. 4 The possible influence of Bishop Wibald's own religious or political perspectives on the art of the cross, or on the message implied by that art, along with the possible difference his personal influence might have had on either of these aspects, is beyond the limited scope of this paper. II: Context

Herakleios ruled Byzantium from 610 to 641 CE. In the early days of Herakleios' reign

(614 CE), Jerusalem was sacked by the armies of the Sasanian king Chosroes II, who also made off with the True Cross.5 It took more than thirteen years for Herakleios to militarily re-group, but in 627 CE he retaliated, earning a major victory near Nineveh, after which the Persians revolted and overthrew Chosroes.6 Despite the possible interpretations of the scene dipicted on the Mosan cross, Herakleios does not appear to have personally killed Chosroes. According to Theophanes,

Herakleios was emperor when Chosroes was killed by his own son, who is variously referred to as Siroes, Shērōē, or Kavadh II.7 In 627 or 628 CE, Herakleios restored the patriarch Zacharias in

Jerusalem, and at the same time “restored the venerable and life-giving Cross to its proper place.”8 By 630, Herakleios had become an obvious symbol of Christian triumph (his own later theological, personal, and military scandals notwithstanding).9

The conflict between Herakleios and Chosroes is attested to in the Chronicle of the

Christian monk Theophanes Confessor, written in the early ninth century as the continuation of a work begun by the historian George Synkellos.10 Theophanes, following Synkellos' and earlier

Greek historical traditions, styled his work a complete history of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine empire, as well as that of the Christian East under the Muslims.11 Herakleios' victory as related therein effectively makes him (at least in retrospect) the prototypical Crusader, and it is not difficult to see why Conrad's supporters would have sought to make the comparison.

5 Timothy E. Gregory, A History of Byzantium (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010): 172. 6 Gregory, A History of Byzantium, 173. 7 There is some confusion about certain absolute dates across the sources, but the significant events are consistent. Theophanes Confessor, The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History AD 284- 813, trans. Cyril Mango, Roger Scott, and Geoffrey Greatrex (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997): 453-5. 8 Theophanes, The Chronicle, 459. 9 Gregory, A History of Byzantium, 173-174, 176. Perhaps Herakleios' personal scandals served to make him more comparable to Conrad, in that both were seen as – or believed to be – capable of great victory despite great failure, be it military, theological, or any other sort. 10 Theophanes, The Chronicle, xliii, l-li. 11 Ibid., lii. Conrad, on the other hand, was the first Holy Roman Emperor of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, and ruled Germany (the German kingdoms) from 1138-1152 CE.12 The account of his reign in Judith Bennett's short history of medieval Europe is precisely that – short, and utterly unremarkable.13 Without delving too deeply into the political complexities of the era, it is safe to say that Conrad, like his contemporaries, was deeply invested in reclaiming the Hold Land by means of the ill-fated Second Crusade in 1147-1148 CE.14 He was, however, unsuccessful, and along with what was left of the Crusader armies, “returned home shamefaced and empty- handed.”15

III: Historiography

According to Leslie Brubaker, a historian and professor of Byzantine art, “luxury goods were exchanged as objects of trade, as spoils of war, and as gifts,” throughout and across the medieval Mediterranean world, and their meanings could shift in the process of these exchanges.16 The first part seems self-evident, but the second is perhaps less so. While the cross in question was not itself exchanged across a great cultural or geographic distance, its symbols and signifiers – the narratives it carried, and those with which it was quite deliberately decorated

– were. And, more precisely within the context that Brubaker provides, the exact relevance of these objects' narratives is altered by the user: no matter what the original source of the story was, what matters is how the audience for the carrier of that story interprets it. In this case, the story of

Chosroes' subjugation to and defeat by Herakleios was interpreted and re-told as a Crusader

12 Judith M. Bennett, Medieval Europe: A Short History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011): 239. 13 Bennett, Medieval Europe, 239, 244. 14 Ibid., 226. 15 Ibid. 16 Leslie Brubaker, “The Elephant and the Ark: Cultural and Material Interchange across the Mediterranean in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 58 (2004): 175-6. narrative for the (presumable) audience in Conrad's court, and those of his successors.17 A cross of such size was intended for ostentatious display, and the ability to reinforce that display of power – military, religious, political and ideological all at once – with a Crusader narrative (that is, by connecting it to a larger story) helps prop him up, possibly in his own eyes (validation) and in the eyes of his court (intimidation). It was a processional cross, designed to be monumental and to impress the viewer.18 Despite the fact that Brubaker here deals mainly with the

Mediterranean in the eighth and ninth centuries, these underlying premises remain relevant.

Brubaker's work also testifies to a long-standing tradition of cultural and narrative exchange between the Germanic west and the Byzantine east.19 The story of Chosroes and Heraklios is as much a cultural object as any physical item carried from east to west. Whether it is historically true or fictive in any modern sense is irrelevant; it still became culturally symbolic.

The Louvre attests that, despite its date of manufacture falling after Conrad's death, the cross should be understood within “the context of the years that followed the abbacy of Wibald of

Stavelot,” who served under both Conrad and his predecessor Lothar III, beginning in 1130.20 It makes more sense to read the cross as related to Conrad's reign because of the attention given to the restoration of the True Cross, the return of which (at the hands of Herakleios) is represented on the panel opposite the one depicting Chosroes' defeat.21 Wibald was friends with the Byzantine emperor at the time, and it has been proposed that Wibald himself received relics of the True

Cross as a gift.22 The relevance of this is that his friendship with Byzantium makes it all the more

17 Presumably not for Conrad himself, because the Louvre dates the production of the cross to 1160-1170, while Conrad died in 1152. The connection between Conrad, the cross, and its narratives is extremely strong, however, in light of Wibald of Stavelot's position at court and role as a patron of the arts. Bardoz, “Four Plaques from the Same Cross,” www.louvre.fr. 18 Durand, “Une Plaque Centrale de Croix Mosane,” 49. 19 Brubaker, “The Elephant and the Ark,” 176, 178. 20 Bardoz, “Four Plaques from the Same Cross,” www.louvre.fr. 21 Durand, “Une Plaque Centrale de Croix Mosane,” 51, fig. 5. 22 Holger A. Klein, “Eastern Objects and Western Desires: Relics and Reliquaries between Byzantium and the West,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 58 (2004): 292-3. likely that he very clearly understood the implications of the narratives adorning the cross that he commissioned.

The Mosan cross, and its expression of Wibald's (probable) personal taste, was in keeping with a theme of Crusader art in Conrad's court, particularly monuments and artifacts that evoked the Crusades in some way.23 Elements of the frescoes in a church of the same era, for example, were chosen specifically because of how they echo and reinforce Crusader narratives. Most interesting is Anne Derbes' contention that the depiction of the successful siege of Jerusalem for a monarch who had been, to that point, largely unsuccessful, was atypical.24 This narrative's depiction on Conrad's cross may not have been seen as strange because by the time of its production, he would have reclaimed the piece of the True Cross, and thus had at least a partial victory to celebrate. The theme of cleansing and restoring holy places of Arab or Muslim influence, however defined, however, is strong throughout the entire Crusader art tradition.25

As a point of context, there is other evidence of Byzantine influence on otherwise

“western” twelfth-century Crusader art. A good example is the psalter of Queen Melisande, which dates from 1139, in which a historiated initial includes a western-style (according to the author) depiction of King David, wearing a decidedly Byzantine crown.26 Other images from the same manuscript also display a mix of western-European and Byzantine art and imagery.27 This helps to explain the presence of a Byzantine story on a German cross. In Byzantine art, heretics are often made visually submissive – downtrodden or dying by the sword.28 This convention is both

23 Another of Conrad's chancellors, Arnold of Wied, bishop of Cologne, had the church of St. Clement, Schwarzrheindorf, built in 1151 with frescoes reflecting similar themes to those on the Mosane cross. Anne Derbes, “The Frescoes of Schwarzrheindorf, Arnold of Wied and the Second Crusade,” chap. 14 in The Second Crusade and the Cistercians, ed. Michael Gervers (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992): 141-2. 24 Derbes, “The Frescoes of Schwarzrheindorf,” 144. 25 Ibid., 145-6. 26 Jaroslav Folda, Crusader Art: The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1099-1291 (Burlington: Lund Humphries, 2008): 33. 27 Folda, Crusader Art, 34-5. 28 Bas Snelders, Identity and Christian-Muslim Interaction: Medieval Art of the Syrian Orthodox from the Mosul Area, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analectia 198 (Leuven: Peeters, 2010): 20-2. practical and propagandist (to impose a modern term), and is clearly carried through on the cross, as a way of telling the story.

IV: Project

As the question of why this panel was originally included on the cross has been addressed above, the question that now remains is why it was chosen for emulation. There are two reasons: the first is the course focus on the Byzantine era, and Herakleios' obvious significance therein.

The second reason is simple: it looks impressive, and appeared (at the outset) to be straightforward to recreate.

The panels of the original cross are made of gilt copper decorated with both champelevé and cloisonné enamel.29 After taking into consideration similar projects that I have attempted before, I have decided to recreate these images in the style of manuscript pages of the twelfth century, as there is enough consistency between illuminations and enamel work in terms of both colour and form to warrant the comparison. Effectively, the appearance is the same; only the medium has changed. The regular inclusion of both colour and gold, as well as the similarities of artistic style, make a manuscript-style reproduction seem the most practical approach. The result of this is an interpretation of the original work, rather than a strict replica or even a recreation. It is a fairly close visual approximation of the enamelled panel. Though the original techniques and materials have not been maintained, the visual impact has, and it has only been reinterpreted so far as allows it to be treated as an illumination on paper, rather than a piece of enamelwork.

The basic materials and tools used for this project are all typical of twelfth- and thirteenth- century manuscript illumination: heavyweight cotton paper (as opposed to parchment or vellum),

29 The copper has been carved or hollowed out in places to allow the enamel to be set into it, and in other places pieces of copper have been applied as raised barriers or dividers, in order to create a three-dimensional effect. Bardoz, “Four Plaques from the Same Cross,” www.louvre.fr. opaque watercolours (pigment suspended in media), gold leaf (both real and imitation were used in period), and egg-white size (glair).30 All of the gold application was done following the directions for medieval manuscript illumination as laid out by Theophilus.31 This meant first sketching out the image and identifying the sections to which the gold would be applied. The gold needs to go on before the colour, as it can adhere to the paint if applied later. Clemens and

Graham's translation of Theophilus reads as follows:

To apply the gold, take the white of an egg beaten up without water, and with a paintbrush lightly

coat the surface on which the gold is to be placed. Moisten the handle of this brush in your mouth,

touch one corner of the leaf you have cut off, and, lifting it like this, apply it with the greatest speed

and smooth it out with the brush. At this moment you should be careful of draughts and hold your

breath because if you breathe out you will lose the leaf and only retrieve it with difficulty. Then it

has been applied and is dry, lay another over it in the same way if you so wish, and a third

similarly, if required, so that you can polish it more brightly with a tooth or with a stone.32

If anything, Theophilus understates the delicacy required to apply the gold leaf without losing it in the process. The glair, however, proved excellent at adhering the gold to the page. This stage of the process, for the equivalent of a single panel, took between twelve and fifteen hours to complete, because of the detail required around the wings and crown.

Once the illumination (the application of gold) was complete, watercolours were applied.

While the basic sketch helped to guide the initial layers, later details made it necessary to refer to the source image throughout the painting process. In this particular instance, opaque watercolour

30 Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 32-3. The glair, in this case, was made by lightly beating an egg white, allowing it to rest overnight, and then removing the top layer in order to clarify it. By all accounts and personal experience, the adhesive properties of the glair improve with age, and so the clarified egg white was sealed and stored at room temperature for a full year (by pure chance, it had been prepared for another project in February of 2015). When applied to the page, the “burnt sulphur” smell that accompanied the glair dissipated as soon as it dried. Interestingly, the paper turned black in places where the gold was applied to the page and then peeled up, while places where the glair was applied but gold was not remained off-white; the chemical reactions (corrosion or anodization of some sort) that may have caused this are unclear. 31 Clemens and Graham, Manuscript Studies, 34-5. 32 Ibid., 34. – such as would have been used in manuscript illustration – took the place of the coloured enamels that would have been applied to the original cross. This process took between eight and ten hours. The final stage of the illustration, which does not have an exact parallel in the original cross, was the inking: outlining certain major features in black ink, applied using the same type of extremely fine-tipped brush as was used for the colours. This took perhaps another four or five hours. While these times cannot be compared directly to what may have been required in order to construct the original cross, it can be said with absolute certainty that simply painting an image on a page is a far simpler and faster process than constructing a three-dimensional processional cross.33 The whole process – which, it is important to note, only entailed one panel on a cross with ten to fourteen, depending how they are divided – was very labour intensive, and helped give an appreciation of the amount of work, and of the time and money that would have been invested, in creating something like this. The images on this cross – the stories that it was made to tell – were not chosen lightly.

33 A conservative estimate puts a single panel at 25 hours of work for this method; the original undoubtedly took longer. Fourteen panels, plus the main structure itself, would have taken 350 hours of work at minimum. Appendix A

The image above is that which has been reproduced for this project. Jannic Durand's article includes images of all the panels from the cross, but due to their quality in the copy of the article, as provided by the Université de Montréal, the coloured (and much higher-definition) photo of the plaque taken by Marie-Lan Nguyen has been used for reference.34

34 Durand, “Une Plaque Centrale de Croix Mosane,” 51; Nguyen, “Cherub and Heraclius.” References

Primary Sources

Bardoz, Marie-Cécile. “Four Plaques from the Same Cross: Christ Blessing – Saint Mark, and the

Sacrifice of Abraham – Cherub, and Heraclius and Chosroes – Saint Luke, and Abraham

and Melchisedech.” Department of Decorative Arts: Middle Ages. The Louvre, Paris.

http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/four-plaques-same-cross-christ-blessing-saint-

mark-and-sacrifice-abraham-cherub-and-h.

Durand, Jannic. “Au Départment des Objets d'Art du Louvre: Une Plaque Centrale de Croix

Mosane du XXIIe Siècle Représentante le Christ Bénissant.” Revue du Louvre: La Revue

des Musées de France 46, no. 5 (1996): 48-53.

Nguyen, Marie-Lan (Jastrow). “Cherub and Heraclius Receiving the Submission of Khosrau II;

Plaque from a Cross.” The Louvre, Paris. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclius#/

media/File:Cherub_plaque_Louvre_MRR245.jpg.

“Plaque de Croix: Triomphe d'Héraclius.” Musée Dobrée. Grand Patrimoine de Loire-Atlantique,

Nantes. http://grand-patrimoine.loire-atlantique.fr/jcms/collections/online-databases/

chosen-works/department/les-arts-decoratifs/plaque-de-croix-triomphe-d-heraclius-en-

eja_100487.

Theophanes Confessor. The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern

History AD 284-813. Translated by Cyril Mango, Roger Scott, and Geoffrey Greatrex.

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

Secondary Sources

Bennett, Judith M. Medieval Europe: A Short History. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011.

Brubaker, Leslie. “The Elephant and the Ark: Cultural and Material Interchange across the Mediterranean in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 58 (2004):

175-95.

Clemens, Raymond, and Timothy Graham. Introduction to Manuscript Studies. Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 2007.

Derbes, Anne. “The Frescoes of Schwarzrheindorf, Arnold of Wied and the Second Crusade.”

Chapter 14 in The Second Crusade and the Cistercians. Edited by Michael Gervers, 141-

54. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.

Folda, Jaroslav. Crusader Art: The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1099-1291.

Burlington: Lund Humphries, 2008.

Gregory, Timothy E. A History of Byzantium. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Klein, Holger A. “Eastern Objects and Western Desires: Relics and Reliquaries between

Byzantium and the West.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 58 (2004): 283-314.

Snelders, Bas. Identity and Christian-Muslim Interaction: Medieval Art of the Syrian Orthodox

from the Mosul Area. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analectia 198. Leuven: Peeters, 2010.

General Histories

Mango, Cyril, ed. The Oxford History of Byzantium. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Rosenwein, Barbara H., ed. Reading the Middle Ages: Sources from Europe, Byzantium, and the

Islamic World. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014.

Shepard, Jonathan. The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire c. 500-1492. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2008.