A Note on Carolingian Architecture at Aachen*

by Warren Sanderson
Concordia University, Montreal & The University of Vermont
Throughout the twentieth-century, a thorough critical analysis of Aachen's fundamental Carolingian buildings that would take account of a wide range of pertinent viewpoints has remained a siren-like challenge for architectural historians and archaeologists of Medieval Europe's beginnings. With the flow of observations from the "restoration" of virtually all of Charlemagne's palace chapel early in the century, with its many literary descriptions and mentions in contemporaneous and later texts and with many extant pictorial sources also to be carefully reconsidered,[1] a virtual floodcrest of information inhibits the grand synthesis that we so much need. Writing a monograph on Carolingian Aachen's buildings would be a daunting task now, better fit for a team of gifted researchers than for an individual. So I'll pose only three questions about the architecture of the palace precinct: first, in which Carolingian architectural context may we best view Aachen's monunments; second, just when were they built; and third, why were they erected?

Einhard's vita Karoli Magni of the 820s and Notker Balbulus' gesta Karoli of the 880s asserted the importance of Aachen's palace precinct for their contemporaries although Aachen was only one of fourteen palace complexes that Charlemagne (768/771-814) sponsored. His three favorites were Aachen, Ingelheim and Nijmegen, and among these, according to Einhard, Ingelheim ranked first: not Aachen. Ingelheim and more recently Paderborn have been systematically excavated.[2] Carolingian remains have been excavated at Frankfurt am Main, at Herstal which today is a suburb of Liège, at Regensburg and at Worms. At Samousy and Thionville we know little with certainty about the Carolingian complexes. And Charlemagne's buildings at Compiègne, Quierzy, and Attigny are mostly literary riddles received from later sources.

As king of the Franks and Lombards, Charlemagne celebrated Christmas of 787 and Easter of 788 at Ingelheim, a palace probably ready for habitation by June, 788. He returned in 791 and again in 807, by which time it was certainly completed. Since their dates of construction, and their royal patronage were the same, a glance toward Ingelheim may help to clarify Aachen's initial meaning.

Though Ingelheim's remains are, in all, less impressive than Aachen's, it has been graphically fairly well reconstructed. The Ingelheim palace precinct had three long, two-storied buildings that formed a "U" describing a courtyard 60 x 74 m. while its fourth side, the east, consisted of a great atrium, 87m in diameter, enclosed by a broadly-curved, perhaps two-storeyed colonnaded pavillion. In the south half of Ingelheim's west wing was its royal audience hall (aula regia), an uninterrupted rectangular space (14.5 m x c.38 m) with an axial semicircular apse projecting south. Most likely much more of Ingelheim's palatial grounds remain to be found.

What we do have, however, relates to a Roman palace tradition. Ingelheim's large central court recalls late Antique and early Merovingian palaces as at Pfalzel near Trier, while its broadly curved east entrance facade and semicircular courtyard repeat those of Roman Augst (now Basel) in Switzerland and such imperial villas as the third century Teting on the Moselle. Links with historic Classical and Christian Rome were particularly evident in Ingelheim's royal audience hall's frescoes. There Carolingian fresco fragments excavated between 1960 and 1970 probably belonged to a program described in detail by Ermoldus Nigellus in a poem of 826-828. From Ermoldus' account, the Ingelheim aula's frescoes may be dated to between 785 and before Charlemagne's coronation in 800.

Apparently meant to legitimize his rule by showing that his authority descended from Pagan and Christian Antiquity through the first Christian rulers of the Roman empire, to the Frankish dynasty, and finally to himself, this program effectively conveyed Charlemagne's place in history. Ingelheim's frescoes reflected the ambitions of a Christian Frankish ruler borne of a reclaimed Roman heritage that enabled his association with the pagan pax Augustana and an imperial Constantinian Christianity. It seem to me that the contemporaneous palace complex at Aachen would have been imbued with similar concepts of rulership.

Charlemagne arrived at Aachen for the first time in twenty years in the winter of 788/789, and then did not return for five years, that is - not until 794. From the autumn of 794, an abrupt increase in his stays at Aachen was sustained into the autumn of 806. That leads us to pinpoint the autumn of 794 as the time that king, court, and accompanying retinues first occupied the new palace precinct. Construction that made this possible most probably began not after the king's visit in the Winter of 788, but more likely in the Spring of 789; and it must have been very well along by the autumn of 794.

But how long did construction take at Aachen's palace precinct? The dwarf, Einhard, who was not only Charlemagne's biographer but from 791 on also his overseer of works at Aachen, wrote (in his vita Karoli) that the King of the Franks and Lombards took a personal interest in the ongoing building of the palace precinct. This reference to Charlemagne as King of the Franks and Lombards set a time limit of Christmas day 800 on construction, since after that he was addressed as "Emperor." Without regarding the archaeological facts, the contemporaneous literary and documentary data clearly provides us with a fairly precise period for construction at Aachen: Probably begun in the Spring of 789, it continued to near completion by the autumn of 794, a total of more than six years. We'll see that another five to six years was required for the finer work on the palace chapel and the completion of Aachen's aula regia.

What does the mostly extant palace chapel offer us regarding its time of construction and that of the palace precinct's adjoining buildings? This first great, fully-vaulted, monumental church building of the early Middle Ages is a remarkably large structure. Set back from its sixteen-sided, two-storeyed exterior, an octagonal central drum rises to end in an eight-sided cloister vault. A towering, massive west building, square in plan with flanking round stairway towers, has communicated directly with the church's gallery and ambulatory since the tenth century. Opposite the west tower, on the east a two-storied rectangular apse projected vaulted at both levels. Spatially, the palace church consisted of two parts: an elegant, tall, colonnaded, superstructure enclosed by a fully-vaulted gallery; and a stout, arcaded substructure, the groin-vaulted ambulatory. Behind the great west tower, between the ambulatory's west entry bay and the eastern chancel bay are three square lateral bays to either side. Each was screened and had an altar where members of the royal chancery celebrated Mass. Though otherwise a treasure trove of archaeological data, this church conceals too well its original dates of construction.

A lost inscription, recorded in a late ninth-century copy in a manuscript now in Vienna, named a certain Odo buried at Metz as the palace chapel's master of works, but failed to inform us of when this Odo worked at Aachen.[3] Studies of the palace chapel's foundation masonry get us nowhere in determining when the church was begun. Its extraordinarily fine ashlar masonry is so unparalleled among Frankish buildings that the workers responsible for it, and one assumes also their master of works, would surely have come from far beyond the borders of the Franks' royal realms, as at least one late 9th century text corroborates.[4] Finally for archaeological observations of the palace chapel today, although dendrochronological evidence from fragments beneath the crowning octagonal cloister vault suggested a date after 776 (+/-10), the wood samples used in that investigation were so poor as to make any results scientifically inconclusive.

If archaeology doesn't get us very far, we'd best return to written documents to take up some that we have not yet considered. Most have shortcomings. For instance, Pope Hadrian-I's famous letter of between 781 and 791 to Charlemagne, releasing mosaics and marble from Ravenna to the Frankish king is often cited as evidence for dating. But it never specified the destination of these materials, and so could have referred to any of the five or six other palaces then under construction, including Ingelheim. More useful, in a letter of July 22nd 798 to Charlemagne, Alcuin of York refers to the palace chapel's columns as being in place. Though that's helpful, whether they were set in some years before or instead quite recently remains uncertain.

A lost notice of 796 from the Annals of Lorsch, copied and so preserved after 816 in the Chronicles of Moissac provides a clearer notion of when the columns Alcuin described were installed. It summarizes Aachen's "church of wondrous size, its cast doors and screen" as having been completed. If even the excellent cast doors and the extraordinarily fine screens of the ambulatory and the gallery were finished by 796, then we may be quite certain that the entire church and probably most of its decoration were also ready by then.

Very likely, the lost original description of 796 was by a certain Richbod, trusted advisor to Charlemagne, member of his peripatetic court for many years since 782, and the main author of the highly reliable Lorsch Annals until his death in 804. The notice of 796, written only two years after the king's court would have been in residence (794) at Aachen, seems about as close as we may ever get to certifying the palace church's date of completion (796). Though other documents suggest later dates, none are viable: that is, none is consistent with the evidence we have presented and more that may be offered. Consequently, 796 remains the most likely date for the completion of the palace chapel.

From this excursion into the problems of dating, we find that the fundamental extant monument of the Carolingian Renaissance was erected during the six years from the Spring of 789 to 796. In this particular case the historical textual evidence of Charlemagne's visits and his presence at Aachen outweigh the known archaeological data and descriptive notices of the building.

With the completion of his palace chapel in 796, Charlemagne would have conveyed architecturally the message that we found in Ingelheim's architecture and frescoes: that of himself as the legitimate successor to the authority of Christian Roman rulership in the West. As the literary documents show, with the "New Constantine" reigning at Aachen, Aachen excelled Ingelheim and all of Charlemagne's other palaces, becoming the Nova Roma of the North.

NOTES

* This essay is excerpted from a paper presented at the Annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in May, 1999, in Houston. That paper will appear in full with more complete documentation in AVISTA FORUM JOURNAL. [BACK]

1. See W. Kaemmerer, II, Aachen 1960; and the excellent summary compilation in Hans Erich Kubach and Albert Verbeek, "Aachen-Dom," v. 1 of 4, Berlin 1976 and later, pp. 1-14, as well as pertinent articles in , I-IV, (esp. vols 3 and 4), Düsseldorf 1965 and ff. [BACK]

2. Uta Wengenrath-Weimann, "Die Grabungen an der Königspfalz zu Nieder-Ingelheim in den Jahren 1960-1970," XXIII, Ingelheim 1973. Walter Sage, "Die Ausgrabungen in der Pfalz zu Ingelheim am Rhein 1960-1970," (Forschungen zur Westeuropäischen Geschichte) 4, Deutschen Historischen Institut Paris, Zürich und München 1977; 141-160, plates XXIII, XXIV. And an exemplary presentation of an excellent excavation is found in.Uwe Lobbedey's, 1978/80 und 1983 (Denkmalpflege und Forschung in Westfalen 11), I: Text, 338pp; II:Befundkatalog, 198pp; III: Plates, 497 ills. on 265pl; IV:Plans, profiles, x-sections, reconstructions, plans. [BACK]

3. The inscription came to us in a late 9th century copy of Einhard's Life of Charlemagne, now in Vienna's Austrian National Library. It is a marginal gloss to chapter 31 of Einhard's Life in the manuscript, Vienna, Vindibonensis 969 (=Theol. 354), f.55v. [BACK]

4. This deduction, made from the character of the actual work at Aachen, follows surprisingly closely the narrative of the Saint Gall monk Notker Balbulus: "Ad cuius fabricam de omnibus cismarinis regionibus magistros et opifices omnium id genus artium advocavit. Super quos unum abbatem cunctorum peritissimum ad executionem operis...constituit." ["He called together to this building from all lands on this side of the sea the masters and and workers of all arts of this type. Over these he set as building leader an abbot who was more experienced than all of the others."] [BACK]

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