Kaiserchronik

(ca. 1146–1150)

   An anonymous Middle High German author (or authors) composed, sometime between 1146 and 1150 in Regensburg, a versified world chronicle in 17,283 verses, with special emphasis on the Roman Empire, from the founding of the city of Rome by Romulus and Remus to the time of the German Hohenstaufen king Conrad III (d. 1151), creating an uninterrupted line of rulers far into the High Middle Ages. According to the Kaiserchronik, the establishment of the Roman Empire by Julius Caesar, the transformation of that empire into a Christian one by Constantine, and the foundation of Germany through CHARLEMAGNE were the highlights of the entire world history. The author(s) heavily relied on many legends and anecdotes about well-known Roman figures, such as Sylvester (pope from 314–335), who converted Emperor Constantine the Great to Christianity in 314 C.E.), St. Faustina (d. 580), and Crescentia (third- or fourth-century Christian martyr), to illustrate the individual emperors’ moral and ethical character. The entire history of medieval Germany, however, is only briefly dealt with in the final 3,000 verses. The chronicle pursues the historical sequence of the emperors and, at the end, of many dukes and princes, although we observe numerous fabrications and gaps.

   The author(s) clearly harbored negative sentiments against the Greeks from antiquity, and espoused the idea that both the German emperor and the pope shared the responsibility for the Christian empire. Many of the profound, historically documented conflicts between both the emperor and the pope are ignored, whereas the history of the German Empire is intimately connected with ancient Rome through an uninterrupted line of rulers. The combination of historical and fictional material in the Kaiserchronik, such as the foundation of the Frankish tribes by the Homeric Trojans after the destruction of their city at the hands of the Greeks, the inclusion of accounts about famous protagonists in Germanic epic poetry (Dietrich of Bern), and finally the blending of myths with facts (wrong identification of the Huns under Attila with the Hungarians), guaranteed its considerable popularity (more than 40 manuscripts). The author(s) drew much of the material from Latin and vernacular sources; the early Middle High German Annolied (ca. 1077) provided the crucial basis for the discussion of Caesar and the Germans.

   Bibliography

   ■ Knape, Joachim.“Historiography as Rhetoric.” In The Medieval Chronicle II, edited by Erik Kooper, 117–129. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2002.

   ■ Ohly, Ernst Friedrich. Sage und Legende in der Kaiserchronik. Untersuchungen über Quellen und Aufbau der Dichtung. Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968.

   ■ Schröder, Edward, ed.Die Kaiserchronik eines Regensburger Geistlichen. Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Deutsche Chroniken, I/1. 1895. Berlin: Weidmann, 1964.

   Albrecht Classen