K
KING CYCLE
. Charlemagne is at the center of the chansons de geste: many of the surviving epics can
be grouped around him and even more so around the other rulers of the Carolingian
dynasty, fused by time within the person of Charlemagne. Nevertheless, such terms as
“King Cycle” or geste du roi remain problematic, since the poems about Charlemagne
were never systematically grouped in a cycle like those of Guillaume d’Orange. The
Charlemagne legend was brought together only later in the hybrid combinations of
chanson de geste and verse chronicle composed by Philippe Mouskés in his Chronique
rimée (completed in 1243) and by Girart d’Amiens in his Charlemagne (early 14th c.),
and in the Franco-Italian epic cycle of MS Venice XIII (ca. 1350), David Aubert’s
Croniques et conquestes de Charlemaine (completed in 1458), and the Old Norse
Karlamagnús saga (ca. 1250). The emperor and his peers figure in the chansons
primarily thanks to the paramount importance of the Chanson de Roland, which
furnished to later poets a stereotypical stock of heroes; the catastrophe at Roncevaux
forms the backdrop for the organization of the cycle. Compared with other historical
figures celebrated in the chansons de geste, however, Charlemagne’s mighty personality,
his prestige as emperor and king, and the fact that so many events of his life were well
known to later generations greatly increased audience interest. Soon after the beginning
of the 12th century, legendary stories about the emperor’s youth, his pilgrimage to the
Holy Land and travel to Constantinople, and his dispute with Ogier and wars against the
Saxons were circulating in the form of chansons de geste. Only the epics about his youth
constitute a more or less autonomous group, the other legends being simply integrated
into the songs about the heroes of Roncevaux. The Latin Pseudo-Turpin chronicle (ca.
1140) already contains, in addition to an exaltation of the military and political service of
the suzerain, the story of Ganelon’s high treason in betraying Charlemagne’s rearguard in
the Pyrénées as he was returning from Spain. The influence of the Pseudo-Turpin is felt
even later in a series of romanticized poems, such as Aspremont, Gui de Bourgogne, and
Otinel. Within the King Cycle, it is the Spanish expedition and, to a lesser degree, the
acquisition of the relics of Christ’s Passion by the abbey of Saint-Denis that form a
further point of departure for poetic treatment. There is, however, no cohesion among the
poems, many of which show centrifugal tendencies and resist a systematic grouping.
Charlemagne’s birth is the subject of Adenet le Roi’s Berte aus grans piés (ca. 1275),
which narrates the romantic circumstances that led to the conception of the son of Pepin
the Short and Bertha (a Hungarian king’s daughter), the future Charlemagne. His youth is
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