A New Look at the Albi Mappamundi

The two most ancient map-style manuscripts in existence are the Albi Mappamundi and the Vatican Mappamundi. Both of these western charts of the Mediterranean-centred world were made in the second half of the eighth century, let's say about 770. One or other may turn out a decade or two older, but until someone scientifically dates the sheepskin on which they are drawn, we have to treat them as equally old.

I have just digitally plotted the Albi Mappamundi with a view to adding it to my Library of Latin Diagrams:

The inspiration for this burst of activity was the appearance online of a very comprehensive, very up-to-date article about the Albi Mappamundi by Anca Dan. La mappemonde d'Albi - un pinax chôrographikos was published in December and she has just been kind enough to post a scan of the article on her Academia.edu page.

She traces this early medieval mappamundi back to a model by Eucher of Lyon, a late-antique Christian leader, based in turn on similar diagrams from his own schooling.

The article's title subtly reminds us that the word mappamundi would have drawn blank looks in antiquity. The term did not exist then. If you had however said pinax chôrographikos (based on a couple of Greek-origin words) to Eucher, he would have got your drift. 

Schools in classical and late antiquity did not teach geography (too mathematical and of no practical use) but chorography (the size, accessiblity, appearance and hospitableness of places, who lived in them, what they produced). So this is a chorographic pinax (chart). Because of that human-practical focus, a mappamundi never shows the absolute positions of places like a true map, but rather their relative positions: what you have to pass by or cross to arrive at a further place.

Readers will recall that I wrote a blog post in 2016 about the arrival online of the Vatican Mappamundi, which is bound (fol. 63v-64r) in codex Vat.lat.6018. The Albi Mappamundi has been online since its Unesco recognition in 2014. Unfortunately I cannot link you directly to fol. 57v-58r of the codex which contains it. Go to the opening page of that codex, ms Albi 29, and page through to image 115.

Dan, Anca. ‘La mappemonde d’Albi - un pinax chôrographikos. Notes sur les origines antiques de la carte et du texte du ms Albi 29 fol. 57v-58r’. Cartes & Géomatique. Revue du Comité français de cartographie, no. 234 (December 2017). Online.

Exposing the Peutinger Diagram

I recently announced a project to study how the late antique Peutinger Diagram was made. This reverse engineering project is comparable to lifting the hood/bonnet of a sleek car in the hope of understanding the mechanical principles by which it was built and operates.

The first step is to create a digital version of the Peutinger Diagram on which we can overlayer the findings as we accumulate them. My starting point is the digital projection of the Diagram created by Professor Richard J. A. Talbert’s team for the 2010 book Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered (Map A).

This projection is a panorama photograph after images of the 12th-century parchment pieces of the sole surviving copy had been stitched together digitally and slightly skewed so that everything matches up.

The result was a banana-shaped image that is not very practicable in full-screen view, so I have straightened the Talbert projection, inserting a single hinge about one third of the way from the left. The left and right tips of the panorama were raised a total of 2.85 degrees with respect to one another.
The pivot point is located at Cesena, Italy and roads and rivers in the vicinity have been adjusted accordingly but the slight shifts are in no way egregious, being well below the diagram's threshold of geographical accuracy.

The second step was to create a scalable vector graphic (SVG) file based on this projection. I began by merging a selection of SVG files which are stored online at the Ancient World Mapping Center in and employed in the Talbert Map Viewer and pivoted these in the same way. I soon found however that they are not very satisfactory from a SVG-design point of view, being full of transforms, unsuitable data objects, data cruft, broken lines and many tracing errors.

I have almost entirely retraced by hand the photographic image with a great many simplifications. This adaptation will provide us a compact, interactive, fast-loading data-file similar to that I have published for the Great Stemma. I have retained the Talbert colour coding system and some of his data objects. Acknowledgement to the Talbert team's work will appear on the new file.

The third step is to match this new data view of the Tabula with the past scholarship, whereby Konrad Miller's 1916 book, Itineraria Romana, is the great monument. Miller, a German citizen-scholar who died in 1933, analysed the diagram into its key routes, effectively recasting its data into list form. What I am now doing is mapping Miller's routes as an over-layer onto the SVG file.

The results will be uploaded as I go to the project page on ResearchGate. Keep visiting the project page to see the progress. Collaborators and followers are very welcome.

Medieval Diagram Commentary Rediscovered

Rediscovering a lost medieval work is the dream of many historians. It has come true for me in the last few weeks as a 6,000-word medieval commentary on a late antique diagram has emerged in my research. For 150 years, medieval manuscripts of Europe have been sifted and catalogued, but sometimes a big fat chunk of writing escapes the scholars' notice. Until now.

This little opus is not easy reading: a Latin commentary which contends that stories in the Old Testament of the Bible foreshadow the life of Christ and the history of the Christian church. What is wonderful about it is its reflections on data visualization, a topic that directly concerns web designers, educators and scientists today.

The commentary is written in gaps of the Great Stemma, a huge 5th-century diagram of biblical history and genealogy (reconstruction here), where the story proceeds from Adam at left to Jesus at right.

The commentator notes that the genealogy of the Gospel of Luke "is laid out like a builder's line in the hand of the Father", which makes sense if you look at the drawing:

The line is a string (funiculus) that a bricklayer pegs out to set a line of bricks to, and that's an interesting comment. A line of data, also described with another Latin word for a string, filum, is the fundamental unit of data visualization, whether it's a series of nodes in a network, an axis on a graph or dates in a timeline.

The commentator also quotes Gregory the Great (c.540– 604), a writer who is a pre-eminent late antique source on visualization. Gregory was interested in omnivision, the all-seeing view.

Gregory has a section (18.46) in Moralia in Iob where he disparages wisdom composed only of eloquent words (quam sunt verborum compositionibus) and contrasts surface perception (ante humanos oculos) with divine perception. The implication here is that you see things more truly in a diagram than when they are wordily explained. The commentator has quoted this passage in full in the opus.

You can read the full transcription of the rediscovered Latin document on my website (sorry, I cannot translate Latin, but the passage from Gregory can be found elsewhere in English (scroll down to [xlvi]). I have provided links from my transcription to the digitized manuscripts.

I can't yet tell you who the author is. Much of the little opus consists of quotes from the Expositio/Quaestiones in Vetus Testamentum by Gregory's contemporary, Isidore of Seville (560-636), so it could even have been composed during Isidore's lifetime.

How did the document emerge back into the light of day? Like so many good things, it was hidden in plain sight. It is copied in four well-known 12th-century grand bibles: the Bibles of Parc, Floreffe and Foigy (all from monasteries in the Meuse valley) and the Romanesque Bible of Burgos in Spain. Three of them are online, so that counts as very plain sight.

The epitome of Isidore is in the chunks of text at the bottom of this sample spread from the Parc Bible.

As a wise observer commented to me, philologists probably overlooked the work because it is written in the gaps in a drawing. Scholars generally expect a serious work to appear in a manuscript as slabs of text, not interlaced with a genealogy. The key difficulty in disentangling the text was to determine which bits are the Isidorian enthusiast's commentary and which bits have other origins.

Four strata in the development of the diagram as you see it above can be distinguished.

The underlying diagram, containing 540 names written in connected roundels and extending the length of a papyrus roll, was devised by an anonymous patristic author to demonstrate the flow of Old Testament history and to reconcile a conflict between the genealogy of Jesus offered by the Gospel of Matthew and that laid out in the Gospel of Luke.

The original state of this lowest layer is witnessed by a manuscript in Florence (Plut. 20.54, 11th century). Its date prior to 427 and its extent is documented by a text known as the Liber Genealogus. The Great Stemma, as I call it, is the only known large Patristic diagram. As evidence of data visualization in western antiquity, its importance is only surpassed by that of the Peutinger Table of highways of the Roman world.

The Christian diagram, of which 25 witnesses including the four bibles survive, is known to have initially circulated in early medieval Spain sub-sectioned into 18 codex pages.

In one fork of its development, its solution to the contradiction between the Gospel genealogies was anonymously altered to conform to a theory by Julius Africanus. The Latin translation by Rufinus of the essence of that proposal was appended. This is the second of the strata in the version we are concerned with here, and is witnessed solely by a text-only abstract in the Bible of Ripoll at the Vatican (Vat. lat. 5729, 11th century).

Imbued with the spirit of Isidore, the epitomizer later implanted the bible commentary on that surface. He or she entered many notes in the blank spaces to lay down a third stratum.

In a final development, an editor, perhaps a northern European in the mid medieval period, prefaced the main diagram with an arbor consanguinatis figure and a brief text associating the diagrams with one another as symbols of Christ's cross. This fourth stratum, seen only in the three Mosan bibles (mid 12th century), has been recently analysed by Andrea Worm and requires no discussion here.

Until we understand this stratification, we cannot recognize stratum three as a distinct entity. Only scientific investigation can extract stratum three from the matrix of words in which it has become fossilized. Scholars of Isidore will be excited at the emergence of this commentary, which contains the essence of the Expositio, at about one-twelfth of that work's length, since it illuminates the way the medieval world received and adapted the works of Isidore.

I have thought a lot about whether Isidore himself might have created this version, since it seems to me, from my own experience of a lifetime of editorial cutting, that it is easy to expand a text by inserting interlinear words and phrases while keeping its syntax, but difficult on the fly to abbreviate a handwritten text while preserving its syntax, as this epitome does.

That thought might lead one to the notion that this text could have been Isidore's own first draft. However I cannot yet see any definite evidence for that in the text. In fact, we cannot establish with any certainty where or when the commentary was written. I would tend to guess at 7th- or 8th-century Spain, but other scholars will have to take that issue on.

For links to the digitized manuscripts and literature, check out my web page.

His and Hers

Our latest investigation concerns a curious courtroom scene possibly drawn by Nicolò da Bologna in Urb.lat.160 at folio 5r. I introduced this manuscript in November 2015 when it was brought online by Digita Vaticana. The St Louis catalog discusses the codex in some detail, as does Stornajolo's Codices Urbinates Latini, Codices 1-500, pp 166-167.

The caption under the scene says "Bonifatius". The miniature appears on the opening page of the Liber Sextus, a compilation of decretals issued under the authority of Pope Bonifatius (Boniface) VIII in 1298. The text on the two columns of this manuscript page has not been fully set up in print since 1582 but can be easily read in a reproduction in the UCLA Digital Collections here at the UCLA Library.

The manuscript dates from about 1380, but the anonymous St Louis cataloger thinks the art may be from 50 years later, noting "The Liber Sextus appears to be written around the same time, but its decoration was probably executed in the 15th century, around 1420-1440, in northern Italy, perhaps Ferrara."

Who is the man in the blue tunic on the far left of the image? My interpretation of the scene is that it shows Bonifatius at centre consulting his law book. Kneeling in front of him are two advocates. The advocate at right is pointing to the woman and is apparently speaking on her behalf. The left advocate appears to represent the man in the blue hat. The setting is Renaissance Italy.

It would be plausible to suppose the two litigants are husband and wife, as couples were frequent parties in canonical courts. The other four seated men in red hats appear to be part of the panel of judges. They are evidently listening to what is being said. The room is low and has a daytime garden visible through the four windows, but that is probably an artistic framing device only, not a real location.

What is going on? The man in blue on the left is scowling. The woman has drawn up her skirt to expose her hem, her blue-slippered foot and an ankle. Perhaps she is avowing she has nothing to hide. @zippyman818 notes that her white/blue garment is the opposite in decoration to the man's blue/white combination at the hem, which must symbolize some irreconcilable difference.

Both man and woman are wearing blue slippers. They are both clearly well-off. And here is the big question: what is the man holding?

It's black, it has a bulb at the bottom left end and it looks as if it is about 60 centimetres long. @zippyman818 and I have been having some fun in a Twitter exchange (expand from this one to see the whole conversation) trying to work out the puzzle.

The first consideration is whether it might be a gun. The first firearm in Europe was the arquebus, and I read that it was employed in the army of Matthias Corvinus, which might get us back to a date of 1460. But this image long predates that, and in any case the object does not have a hook, which is essential to cope with gun recoil (and muzzle loading), and the bulb cannot have a function in any firearm.

Another early answer was a horn, but there is no mouthpiece on the thing. Again the bulb is the puzzle. It's not a klaxon, as rubber bulbs had not been invented. Besides why would a rich litigant take a horn to court? @zippyman818 has also suggested a long-handed chisel or a herb cutter with a mezzaluna blade, but again, why would the pope let you bring one into his courtroom?

[A completely different approach proposes that the object is ceremonial in nature. The arguments are set out in the comments below. Armin argues that it is a sconce, a kind of torch (in case the trial goes on past nightfall?) Ilya Graubart is proposing a mace (if medieval popes had armies, perhaps they had maces or sceptres as well). These arguments would suggest that Mr Blue Tunic is not a litigant, but maybe the pope's majordomo or some other papal panjandrum.]

It has been suggested the black thing might be an artistic emblem identifying some historic person who sought justice from the real-life jurist Bonifatius, or a speaking stick entitling the person to hold the floor, but Blue Tunic's mouth is shut. Or it might be a ritual object like an aspergillum or some entirely forgotten symbol.

My own tendency is believe it is an item of evidence connected to a marital lawsuit, perhaps a sword scabbard. Is the wife being accused of adultery with the sword's owner perhaps? At this point we become fanciful. But clearly, when the miniature was drawn, this object was immediately recognizable and perhaps it even elicited a laugh from the Renaissance reader.

Erlangen Tree

Until recently, a celebrated 12th-century manuscript, variously known as the Chronicle of Frutolf or the Chronicle of Ekkehard of Aura (Erlangen, Universitätsbibliothek, ms 406), was not to be found online. On November 7, German archives blogger Klaus Graf published the news on his site of its arrival and within a matter of hours, my Twitter colleague Pierre Chambert-Protat (@chaprot) went online to alert me to it. Digital social media are a wonderful boon to scholarship.

On November 4, I had published on this blog a schematic outline of a "tree" at folio 204v of the selfsame manuscript. This is a plot, which I originally prepared for my own book but later decided not to use:

This figure, drawn in 1140 or thereabouts, is adapted from the century-old Stemma of Cunigunde, a drawing made in or shortly after 1013 when Cunigunde was anointed Holy Roman Empress. You can examine a reconstruction of that stemma on my website.

What does it show? The most important person here is R - Charlemagne - whose empire was divided among three of his grandsons by the Treaty of Verdun.

To enhance the chronicle, Ekkehard (or his predecessor editor Frutolf) repurposed the old diagram as a study in saintly ancestry by adding to it images of Arnulph and his holy mother Begga. Other manuscripts of the Ekkehard Chronicle present the Stemma of Cunigunde more or less faithfully, but the scribe-artist of the Erlangen codex decided to have some fun with it. He inverted it, and drew the figure of Arnulph at the left and Arnulph's saintly mother Begga at right. The bottom roundel (A in my plot) represents Arnulph.

Curiously, this artist omitted Cunigunde, although she had been the motive for creating the original drawing and she was revered in the entire Bamberg area, where this miniature was almost certainly made, as a holy figure and foundress of the cathedral. One must at least consider the possibility that the stemma was inverted in order to conceal her deliberate exclusion.

You can now enjoy the original at fol. 204v of the digital surrogate: 

What change in medieval culture had made this startling inversion of the stemma not just possible, but acceptable to the customer, probably the Cistercian Monastery of Heilsbronn in Germany which became the long-term owner of this codex? Is this quirky conversion on an artist's desk the precise moment when the family tree, later to become a prestigious badge of nobility, was invented?

As with all big questions, the answer is not a simple one. A long inquiry was conducted into these issues by Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. As a historian of Renaissance culture, she was curious about the roots of the craze from the 15th to the 19th centuries to depict European aristocratic genealogies by painting vast leafy trees where portraits of ancestors were pinned to a trunk and out onto the boughs. 

Researching her 2000 book, L'Ombre des Ancêtres, she cast far back into the medieval period, seeking precursors to those trees. This Heilsbronn tree of the late 12th century, as well as a couple of other painted trees made at roughly the same time at Weingarten, a monastery in the southwest of Germany, only dimly foreshadow the Renaissance craze. 

The Weingarten artist, working between the years 1185 and 1191, drew a leafy inverted stemma of the powerful Welf family with its most ancient known ancestor peeking out from inside the trunk at ground level, while a wide space was reserved in the crown of the foliage to be occupied by the Welfs' most illustrious offspring (by female descent), King Frederick Barbarossa. This is in Fulda, 100 D.11, folio 13v and is online. The other from Weingarten is now lost but an image of the tree was published by its owner, the collector and dealer Robert Forrer, in 1907. Unfortunately that book is not yet online. In Europe, it does not enter the public domain until 2018.

Klapisch-Zuber came, in effect, to the conclusion that it would involve an anachronism to call these drawings family trees or Stammbäume. There was no firm mental association between trees and the specific idea of ancestry yet.

The cultural change that took place in the 12th century with the rise of Gothic art was in fact much broader. Trees enjoyed a wide variety of uses in the graphic arts, ranging from trees of sevens as mnemonic devices to the tree manifestations of the Virga Jesse motif. Gothic cathedrals are in a certain sense trees of stone. This was what drove the experiments at Heilsbronn and Weingarten.

As I have already pointed out, inverted stemmata made to resemble trees with roots in soil are a rarity before the 16th century. It was 16th-century scholars like Scipione Ammirato who deserve the credit as the true originators of the family tree, not the medieval artists who created trees of ancestry more or less by fluke.

Forrer, Robert, ed. Unedierte Miniaturen, Federzeichnungen u. Initialen des Mittelalters. Strasbourg: Elsässische Druckerei, 1907.

Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. L’ombre Des Ancêtres. Paris: Fayard, 2000.

Dominic's Fiddle

When the Frauenkirche in Dresden was raised in 2005 from the rubble, the few blackened stones left after the February 1945 fire-bombing were proudly incorporated amidst the new sandstone for all to see (2008 picture below). But when an Irish scribe named Dominic interspersed the "wrong" Latin text in a Vulgate bible, he doubtless hoped nobody would notice.

Working between 600 and 800 CE at a monastery in the godless wastes of North Italy, Dominic had been assigned to write out a bible now known as the Codex Ottobonianus and digitized a few days ago by Digita Vaticana. You can see Ott. lat. 66 here.

The model he was copying from must have been torn or partly illegible. Resourcefully, Dominic copied the missing bits from an Old Latin bible in his library that dated back to before the 400 CE translation by Jerome of Sidon. Naturally, he does not draw any attention to the places where he has woven in the obsolete phrasing, but after this fiddle, his autograph on folio 112v, "Pray for me, Dominic the Priest" (orate pro me Dominico Prbitero), must have been tinged with a heartfelt hope that he would never be caught:

In the end, the truth did come out. The codex is a godsend for those interested in what Latin Christians read before Jerome came along. Like the sooty stones in the Frauenkirche, its scattered old phrases are now prized as links to the far past.

In the science of Vetus Latina scripture, the Codex Ottobonianus is designated Beuron number 102 among the rare surviving witnesses to the Old Latin Genesis (see my list of Beuron numbers) and has been exhaustively analysed by biblical scholars. But it is also a key source for Jerome's text. Now everyone can see this valued book with ease.

Here is what Bonifatius Fischer's Vetus Latina edition of Genesis (Freiburg, 1950) has to say about the codex, which I am adding here since it is lacking in the BAV online bibliography:

296 ff; 32,5 x 27,5 cm; 2 Kolumnen zu 31 Zeilen; Unziale des 7./8. Jh. "Written apparently in North Italy. The scribe Dominicus signs on fol. 112v: ORATE PRO ME DOMINICO PRBITERO SCRIPTORE. The occurrence of the Insular symbol for 'autem', the use of red dots with the capitals, and the type of figures in the illustrations suggest some Insular centre in Italy." (E.A. Lowe).
Die Hs enthielt den Heptateuch oder Oktateuch in Vulgata, heute bricht sie bei Jdc 13,20 ab; außerdem fehlt zwischen fol. 6 und 7 ein Blatt mit Gn 6,9-7,11. In den Vulgata-Text sind immer wieder Stücke aus der Vetus Latina eingesprengt, und zwar:

• Gn 37,27-35;
• 38,6-11;
• 41,1-4. 14-21;
• 46,15-17. 30;
• 48,13-14. 20-Schluß von Gn;
• Ex 10,13-15;
• 11,7-10;
• 15,1-2;
• 16,16-17,10;
• 19,13. 22-24;
• 20,17-18;
• 22,30-27,5;
• 29,44-45.

Andere Textstücke fehlen in der Hs einfach. Um eine solche Lücke auszufüllen, sind die Blätter 66 67 und 68 mit Vulgata-Text (Ex 4,19-6,27) nachträglich eingefügt worden. Weiterhin zeigen einige Fehler der Hs, daß die Vorlage der Hs alt war und noch Scriptura continua hatte: iaridesi statt iair id est, hi est amecum statt hic sta mecum, uidis eas statt ut discas usw.
Wir gehen also wohl nicht fehl mit der Annahme, daß die alte Vorlage der Hs teilweise unleserlich war, wohl auch ganze Blätter verloren hatte. Der Schreiber half sich, indem er die Lücken mit einem ihm zu Gebote stehenden altlateinischen Text von Gn und Ex ausfüllte; zu Lv scheint er einen solchen altlateinischen Text nicht mehr gehabt zu haben; deshalb sind dort die Lücken geblieben. In Gn 37,33-35 entstand ein merkwürdiges Gemisch aus Vulgata und Vetus Latina, da der Kopist hier die in seiner Vorlage noch lesbaren Wörter aus der Vulgata übernahm und den Rest aus seiner altlateinischen Bibel ergänzte.
Die Hs ist in der neuen römischen Vulgata-Ausgabe als einer der drei Hauptzeugen unter dem Sigel O benützt.

Of the principle Genesis source, cod. 403 at Lyons, France, almost nothing is online. A future project on this blog is to survey Vetus Latina material that has been digitized so far.

Bumper book of medieval adventure in 549 full-colour frames

One of the treasures that popped out among the 64 items digitized so far this week by the BAV, the historic research library at the Vatican in Rome, is the Hungarian Angevin Legendary. It's an astonishing, comic-book style compilation of lives of saints full of gold and silver and technicolor gore. According to fellow blogger Zsombor Jékely, there are 549 known frames.

Here's my namesake John the Baptist being frogmarched by Herod's goons into the palace to have his head chopped off (folio 5r). Each of these pictures rewards many minutes of rapt attention. The Legendary was full of compelling visual storytelling techniques. Add a few speech bubbles and you would have a modern graphic novel. With some Ken Burns effects, many of the pages could easily be turned into some very impressive video.

The old story goes that this amazing book was commissioned to delight a spoiled 3-year-old Hungarian prince in about 1340, but that is probably a misconception. In all likelihood this was a strictly adult book, probably commissioned by or for the daddy king himself.

Like too many of the best codices, this one has been criminally dismembered. The BAV has the bulk of it, in the form of Vat. Lat. 8541, which you can now admire online (click the link at left). Quite a bit more is at the Morgan Library in New York (click the link and check out 22r which shows a headless body being dumped down a well). Jékely says there are also bits at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, MS 1994.516 (1 leaf),  Berkeley's Bancroft Library, BANC MS UCB 130:f1300:37 (1 leaf) and further leaves at the Hermitage and at the Louvre.

This is just one of the many good things to explore on the BAV website. Here is my tally of what is new: Arch. Cap. S. Pietro: 19; Barb. gr.: 2; Borgh.: 10; Chig.: 1; Ott. lat.: 2; Reg. lat.: 3; Sire.: 1; Urb. lat.: 1; Vat. ebr.: 10, Vat. estr. or.: 10; Vat. gr. 1; Vat. lat.: 3; Vat. turc.: 1. The total of manuscripts digitized now stands at 1,690. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 2.]

Enemies of Hugh Capet

One of the difficulties of publishing a scholarly book is doubtless the fact that the time-span between research and hitting the market can be several years. This struck me when reading a couple of works from 20 years ago on the Stemma of Cunigunde. I mentioned this remarkable diagram some while back in a blog post.

A plot of it on my website allows you to see more detail. This diagram is the oldest visualization in existence of a genealogy that can be independently documented. The only older genealogical visualization is the Great Stemma, where many of the persons, ranging from David and Solomon to Jesus, are historical figures, but are documented by a single source only, the Jewish and Christian scriptures, and the diagram is not contemporaneous but based on that single source.

The great modern authority on medieval tree diagrams is Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, who published her study, L’Ombre des Ancêtres, in 2000. She rightly gave considerable attention to the Stemma of Cunigunde and its medieval evolution into various new formats.

What I now notice is that her investigation must have been conducted a good decade before her book's publication, because she does not cite the two key studies dating from 1992 and 1994, by Nora Gädeke and Karl Schmid, which advance our knowledge of the Stemma of Cunigunde.

Schmid's study of the Stemma was especially interesting. He instantly recognized that its subject and focus is Cunigunde (at the bottom left), not Charlemagne or any of the figures high up the diagram.

He proposed that the Munich manuscript is a copy, perhaps made decades later, of a document probably drawn up in Metz, where Cunigunde's villainous brother Dietrich II was bishop and no doubt had clerks and a library capable of drawing such a work. Schmid does not opt for a date, though tendentially he suggests this would have been after Cunigunde's coronation as empress in Rome in 1013.

The purpose of his article is to argue that the stemma's core content must go back to a 991 visualization that would have been drawn up by "Carolingian legitimists" in support of Karl, a child, as pretender to the kingship of West Francia in opposition to Hugh Capet (elected 987). Hugh won out and is now regarded as the first king of France, the legitimists lost, and little Karl (the last Carolus in the diagram) simply falls off the face of history. Whether he was killed or lived out a full life as a pitiable might-have-been is unknown. Instead he gains his place in history as the original inspiration for a very remarkable diagram.

The eye-catching festoons at the left and right of the drawing above would have been created to make room to add Cunigunde and the Ottonians to the anti-Capet diagram.

Schmid (Wikipedia entry) bases this ingenious lost-diagram hypothesis on an analysis of errors and non-sequiturs in the graphic arrangement that survives. His article is a most impressive feat of graphic reconstruction, and I think his point of view is convincing. As far as I know, this was the last scholarly thing he wrote. It was published following his 1993 death in a volume that contains his obituary.

From Forum Eeerste Wereldoorlog.nl

He even reaches back a little further, tentatively suggesting that the enemies of Hugh Capet may have found their model in a hypothetical document dating from the 978-984 war between Lothair of West Francia and the Ottonians. Schmid thinks that because the stemma often suppresses the title of "emperor" and because the final central roundel in the drawing above is empty, omitting the name of Louis le Fainéant which should obviously fill it, that ur-ur-diagram might have existed. He conjectures that this could have been a piece of proto-French political propaganda circulated during that conflict to ridicule the proto-Germans' pretensions to be upholding a (First) Reich. That is a sobering millennial thought in this year, when we often have in mind the sombre centenary of a war where elaborate French propaganda, like L'Impérial Semeur at right, so often mocked the Second Reich.

Gädeke, Nora. Zeugnisse bildlicher Darstellung der Nachkommenschaft Heinrichs I. Arbeiten zur Fruhmittelalterforschung 22. De Gruyter, 1992.

Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. L’Ombre des Ancêtres. Paris: Fayard, 2000.

Schmid, Karl. “Ein verlorenes Stemma Regum Franciae. Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Entstehung und Funktion karolingischer (Bild-)Genealogien in salisch-staufischer Zeit.” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 28 (1994): 196–225. doi:10.1515/9783110242263.196.

Biblia Pauperum

The Biblia Pauperum is a kind of medieval Reader's Digest version of the Bible which interprets the Old and New Testament as if the mass of biblical texts had been purposefully written as a book of allusions, where the events of Jewish history foreshadow events in the life of Christ. This exegesis, known as typology, goes back to Origen and beyond.

Each of these connections is demonstrated by a collage of images that comprises two Old Testament events (the types), one New Testament event (their antitype) and head-and-shoulder portraits of four patriarchs or prophets. Bruno Reudenbach of the University of Hamburg says the original Biblia Pauperum manuscripts comprised 34 groups in this format. In the beginning they were laid out two to a page, so that four were visible on a spread.

The usual first collation, for example, would link an image of the Annunciation to the temptation of Eve by the serpent and Gideon finding the fleece soaked by dew, along with David, Isaiah, Ezekiel and Jeremiah. This can be seen in a British Library manuscript (King's 5 f. 1), in Tamara Manning's Internet Biblia Pauperum woodcut (reproduced with the Wikipedia article), or with a slight variation in clm 19414 in Munich.

There is another fine digitized example online at the Heidelberg manuscripts site. This German-language manuscript has extended descriptions of each group. Its first extant collation, for example, shows Joseph being cast into the well, Jonah being swallowed by the whale, Jesus being laid in the tomb and David, Solomon, Jacob and Isaiah (compare this to the English version on Manning's website, go to *g*).

Reudenbach's work at the University of Hamburg is a project of the Centre for Manuscript Cultures. The presentation by Reudenbach and Hanna Wimmer (PDF) says more than 80 such manuscripts still exist.

Cyclopaedia

The Florence copy of the Great Stemma appears in a codex which seems to be an idiosyncratic scrapbook containing snatches of ancient things. I described in an earlier post how Michael Gorman reconstructed its putative source, a library book at Monte Amiata that doubtless had as its title work the Etymologiae, a copious dictionary of legal, religious and other terms by Isidore of Seville, the seventh-century Spanish bishop.

A good many blank pages had evidently been left free at the end of the Monte Amiata copy of the dictionary, and a monkish user, perhaps a teacher or an abbot, had used them as a kind of scrapbook, copying into them a personal miscellany of the sort of items often formerly appended to dictionaries: a guide to syllables, vowels and consonants; Bede's alphabetical directory of Latin grammar exceptions; how to study the bible; the list of Lombard kings; brief repetititions from the Etymologiae; four different chronologies of biblical time; and our diagram.

Seen on its own, each item seems absurdly and wilfully truncated, but if one assumes that its learned user only copied what he really needed - the things he could not easily remember - this begins to make sense. The items belong to a class of things that in my student days I would have photocopied and kept on a window-sill, and that I might now scan and tuck into a miscellaneous folder on my computer.

The book by Junilius, for example, is a collection of thoughts about bible education written in 551 CE and seemingly aimed at a teaching audience. It was published and comprehensively discussed by Kihn (link below to archive.org). John F. Collins prepared a 20th century introduction and English translation, now on James O'Donnell's Cassidorus website.

Other items in this anthology are intended handbook-style for the classroom or self-study.

An illuminating dissertation by Carin Ruff translates sample sections of Bede's De Orthographia and stresses  that it was mainly written to instruct the intermediate student of Latin in the many exceptions of usage and declension in Latin grammar. It is in alphabetical order of keywords. It sets out for example verbs that take the dative. A sample:

Noceo, obsum, incommodo, maleficio, officio, in una significatione ponuntur, quod graece dicitur βλάπτω, et cuncta datiuum casum trahunt. (Noceo, obsum, incommodo, maleficio, officio, are used in one sense (“hinder”), which in Greek is βλάπτω, and they all take the dative case. Translation by Ruff.)

You can read this on the 10th line of the left column of folio 12v of the Florence manuscript Plutei 20.54 (the scribe seems to have got the Greek wrong). Ruff quotes a suggestion that the intended audience for Bede's manual was "the less-experienced copyist or glossator who might 'be dissuaded from making a rash emendation' if he could find an apparently anomalous reading discussed in a readily accessible manual."

The inclusion of four or more contradictory chronologies should not suggest the book's owner had a burning interest in chronography or in resolving the differences among them. Quite the opposite: he clearly wanted something comprehensive which he could look up when he came across a seeming error in a book, resolve quickly whether the anomaly had a genuine source or was merely a "typo" and then move on. He seems to have regarded the Liber Genealogus as a handy quick guide to biblical names and the Great Stemma doubtless served for him a similar purpose.

I deliberately term the Etymologiae here a dictionary, although it is conventionally termed an encyclopaedia, because our modern conception is that an encylopaedia should summarize scientific and scholarly knowledge whereas a dictionary is mainly an aid to finding and correctly spelling the words with which we write about such things. The Monte Amiata handbook must have been much more the second of these things, and it occurs to me that I had just such a book when I was a school pupil and student: Pears Cyclopaedia.

When I first began working as an editor at dpa in the 1980s, the newsroom had no ready references and I arranged for the purchase of a Pears and a Quid. Both had their heyday before the internet and were useful to editors and proofreaders who faced all sorts of unexpected dilemmas over correcting texts and needed this kind of omnibus collection of seemingly useless facts. The cyclopaedia, which is subtitled "A Book of Background Information for Reference for Everyday Use" and was conceived in the medieval spirit as something in between a modern encycylopaedia and a handbook, begins with a chronicle of events from the formation of the Earth.

The appendices to the Monte Amiata copy of the dictionary were probably accumulated with a similar intent: not to transport the texts themselves (which are only excerpted and are largely offered without the necessary metadata such as author's names) but simply to have key facts close to hand. It is interesting that not even a very erudite later owner of Plutei 20.54, Coluccio Salutati, seems to have realized that the handlist of Latin exceptions was a work of Bede, although Coluccio was familiar with Bede's church history. Coluccio began writing out the headwords of the alphabetical list, but only got as far as C and never finished. He never attached the author's name to the list, and his own Latin doubtless became solid enough that he no longer needed such an intermediate-level reference for himself.

Kihn, Heinrich. Theodor von Mopsuestia und Junilius Africanus als Exegeten : nebst einer kritischen Textausgabe von des letzteren Instituta regularia divinae legis. Freiburg: Herder, 1880. Archive.org. Edition and discussion of a work found near the Great Stemma in a codex in Florence.

Ruff, Carin. ‘The Hidden Curriculum: Syntax in Anglo-Saxon Latin Teaching’. University of Toronto, 2001. Website. Usefully translates samples from and discusses Bede’s De orthographia. Follow link to dissertation, go to chapter 4, which is a PDF containing Part II, section 2.

Books of the Bible

I have chanced on a curious medieval infographic showing all the books of the Old Testament in stemmatic fashion, an idea that goes back to Cassiodorus (see my Cassiodorus abstract). The drawing, discovered with the help of Digital Scriptorium, is in the Lawrence Library at the University of Kansas and available in a high-resolution image.

It shows God as the origin node at the top, forking to the various books, for example the Pentateuch as a group of five at the top left, and employing trunk connectors below to connect the books of the prophets. The colours and style recall the Great Stemma.

The bibliographic information places the document (f. 2v of MS 9/2:29) in the 13th or 14th centuries and it is on the back of the final page of a Peter of Poitiers Compendium (see my list). It appears to be a continuation of the Compendium by the same scribe/artist. In the bibliographic description, the library considers it to be French.

Finding Bernhard Pez

Bound into Heinrich Brauer's papers on the Compendium of Peter of Poitiers (the subject of my preceding blog post) is a library research report dated 1951 May 9 compiling reference-book data on this 12th-century work. It was drawn up by the Staatsbibliothek (then the Öffentliche Wissenschaftliche Bibliothek in the Soviet-controlled sector of Berlin).

It is evidence of the industrious help that could once be obtained from research library staff, back in the days before the budgets of such institutions were cut. Brauer was living and working in Celle, half a day's train ride from Berlin, but was able to save himself the trip to Berlin by simply writing and asking for an "Auskunft". We are immeasurably better off nowadays with the instant access available via the internet.

The reply from Berlin is of no great scholarly value and is defective in not containing any mention of the principal survey of Peter's work then in print, that published by Moore in 1930. The librarian also promises to inquire at other German libraries, but as there is no letter on file with any such results, this probably led nowhere. However one of its references, to Bernhard Pez, caught my eye.

The compilation duly mentions the editio princeps by Zwingli the younger published in 1592 in Basle and quotes from a series of reference works:

• Georgi: Allgemeines europäisches Bücherlexikon
• Jocher: Allgeneines Gelehrten-Lexikon
• Nomenclator literarius theologiae catholicae
• Wetzer und Welte: Kirchenlexikon
• The Catholic Encyclopedia
• Histoire littéraire de la France, vol 16

The last of these can be consulted on Google Books and the librarian quotes its mention of an edition by Pez based on the manuscript from "Metsen" in the diocese of Passau, Bavaria. This is a misprint or authorial error for the Benedictine house Kloster Metten.

Bernhard Pez was the librarian of the Benedictine abbey of Melk in Austria and volume 1 (published in 1721) of his Thesaurus anecdotorum novissimus notes that he found a copy of the Compendium in the monastic library during a visit to Metten. The Thesaurus has been digitized by the MDZ (click on the link and go to page 59 of the scan). A researcher has usefully added the handwritten information that the Compendium is at folio 101 of the codex, and Pez states:

Petri Pictaviensis Compendium historie veteris ac novi Testamenti, quod incipit: considerans historiae sacrae prolixitatem etc.

One presumes this manuscript is now in the state library in Munich.

Study in 1951 of a Peter Roll

Heinrich Brauer, a German art historian, undertook a transcription in 1951 of a roll version of Peter of Poitiers' Compendium. As far as I know this typewritten text (the first modern edition since that by Ulrich Zwingli?)* has never been published. The only known copy is deposited at the Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB) in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. I interloaned it last week for a look.

Brauer seems to have included both rolls, Blankenburg 305 and Blank.305a, in an exhibition he organized at Celle Palace, where he was art curator and the transcription and correspondence were apparently part of his work as a public official. The letters may be of some wider interest and I am therefore providing an English translation. Both were addressed to Erhart Kästner, director of the HAB.

The first of the letters from the Kunstgutlager in Schloss Celle was dated 1951 June 18:
 
Dear Dr Kästner,
I ought to have reported back much sooner on my work on the Stemma of Christ manuscript rolls kindly loaned to me by the Wolfenbüttel Library. I would ask you to let me keep the two rolls for a little longer. I completed the transcription of the text some time ago and I am sending it to you to give you some idea, although it is obviously in need of improvement.
We are preparing to hold an exhibition on "Applied Arts and Manuscripts of the 15th century (Kunsthandwerk und Handschriften des 15. Jahrhunderts)". I had been thinking of asking you to permit the Wolfenbüttel rolls to be exhibited in this show, but did not know if a suitable placement would emerge for them. 
I now realize that both can be very well displayed as part of the overall context, which is why I have waited until today to ask for an extension of the loan. We will also be obtaining a pictorial tapestry from Wienhausen for the exhibition, and the rest will come from the stock of the Kunstgutlager, enabling us to assemble quite an impressive show. The inauguration is to take place on July 8 and I hope I will see you then here in Celle.
With best wishes, also to Dr Butzmann,
Greetings and thanks,
H. Brauer

The second is dated 1951 October 8:

Dear Dr Kästner,
When the manuscripts loaned from you were returned I was delighted to hear that my transcription of Blanc 305 ended up with Dr Butzmann. I have now been able to improve the text in many places with the help of the printed edition of 1592.
Blanc 305 and the unnumbered roll contain the same text, which begins with the word "Considerans ..." (....) and is attributed to Petrus Pictaviensis (chancellor of the University of Paris from 1192, died 1205). His works are printed in Migne PL 221 but there is no mention of the Considerans text. 
The Royal Library in Brussels has nine copies of this text, with a person called Gallus listed as the author. The British Museum catalogue names the author as Petrus Pictaviensis or Petrus Comestor without deciding the point. A manuscript (number 128) of the same text from the middle of the 13th century can be found at Admont and is entitled "Ottonis de S. Blasio Chronika prima", cf. Verzeichnis IV,1, editor Buberl (Leipzig, 1911), with two images of it. Buberl: "probably done in Salzburg".
Its script along with the characteristic initials is very similar to Blanc 305. I would therefore propose that Wolfenbüttel parchment roll Blanc 305 of the Stemma of Christ is also a product of Salzburg from the middle of the 13th century.
The paper roll without any Wolfenbüttel number is signed at the end by the scribe: "Pater Gallus presbyter ordinis Sancti Benedicti, Conventualis monasterii Sancti Galli." When I inquired to (the monastery of) Maria Laach, Rev. Dr. Volk replied:

The P. Gallus whose name is in the photo was Father Gallus Kemly of St Gall, born 1417 Nov 18, died soon after 1477. From 1465 he copied P. Comestor, Historia scholastica (i.e. Ms 605 of the St. Gall Library) as well as Excerpta ex historia scholastica et vitis patrum (i.e. Ms 607 of the St. Gall Library); cf. R. Henggeler, Professbuch der fürstl. Benediktinerabtei der Heiligen Gallus und Otmar zu St. Gallen, Zug, 1929, pages 234-236.

I understand the Considerans text circulated widely: it was translated into French, English and German (perhaps into Spanish and Czech too) and was often extended and revised. It is conceived for the education of students and is not just theological in purpose but is at the same time a tabulation of history as well, rather like our Plötz**. It employs Scripture as an historical source and its author sees no dilemma between faith and scholarship.
The text always accompanies the genealogical tables and is often employed as an introduction to the Historia scholastica of Petrus Comestor Trecensis although it contrasts strangely with that wholly theological work. A manuscript in Munich from Metten combines the Considerans text with the Biblia pauperum. Its scribe recognizes its historiographic character since he includes with it the Chronicle of Popes and Emperors of Martinus Polonus of Troppau. This may have been done in the 14th century. The Stemma of Christ precedes the Diadocheen of the Popes, with the emperors laid out in parallel, leading back via Caesar, Alexander, Darius, Cyrus, Nebuchadnezzar by a circuitous route to the archaic parents. It provides an historical vision of monumental simplicity.
We find it in the printed Universal Chronicles such as the Rudimentum of Lübeck of 1475, the Fasciculum temporum of Cologne by Rolevink of 1474 and the Chronicle of Schedel of 1493, which all derive from the Considerans text and even give it as their source. The Lübeck one names the author as Petrus Trecensis. Rolevink names Isidore, not for the entirety, but, as the context shows, as author of a short work dealing with the period of the Old Testament, which is namely our text.
Yours,
Dr. H. Brauer

Schloss Celle, a former royal palace in Celle, north of Hanover, seems to have hosted a large store of displaced art. Brauer's entry in the Katalog der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek indicates a date of birth of 1900 (data 1, data 2), while the German Archaeology Society indicates he died in 1983 (notice). He was an associate of Rudolf Wittkower (subject of a previous post), but I do not know anything else about him.

* [In fact the third: see my listing. Note added 2015]
** Der Große Ploetz, a standard reference book for German secondary schools by Karl Ploetz (1819-1881) which was in print from 1855 to 2008.

In the Eisack Valley

I am in northern Italy looking out a hotel window at the Dolomite mountains and I am considering the feasibility of a passage through this countryside by Queen Cunigunde of Germany in November 1013 on her way to Rome to be crowned as Empress of the West. My flight of imagination has been prompted by Cunigunde’s ancestral stemma: back in March, I published a vector translation of it. It can be found both on this blog and on Piggin.Net. The original, the oldest extant stemma of a real-life family, was drawn up at some point between 1002 and 1024 to emphasize the queen's claim to imperial rank. It would be plausible to believe that she took this parchment drawing with her in her baggage when she passed through this landscape with her husband Henry and the imperial army.

Reconstructing the route used 1,000 years ago by Henry and Cunigunde is not easy. The main stops on the trip can be established from the Regesta Imperii, the summary, formerly printed and now online, of extant legal documents issued during the travels of the Holy Roman Emperors. Unlike the papal regesta, which were registers (the modern spelling) of correspondence compiled contemporaneously by papal secretaries, the imperial regesta are reconstructions: modern tabulations compiled by historians from widely scattered documents in archives. It is fairly plain from the regesta that Cunigunde, Henry and the army conducted a two-month crossing via the Brenner Pass from Augsburg in Germany to Pavia, capital of the Lombard kingdom of northern Italy, arriving in time for Christmas after being held up by floods in northern Italy.

November is perilously late in the season for an alpine crossing, even if you are in command of an imperial German army sworn to ensure your absolute safety. As winter approaches, the snowline is descending and the hours of daylight are growing short. Approached via Innsbruck, Austria from the north, the Brenner Pass is the lowest saddle in the main alpine watershed and therefore the safest track to use in late autumn. After crossing it at an elevation of only 1,370 metres, well below the treeline, the medieval track then descended toward Italy, following the valley of the Eisack (or Isarco) River. The principal impediment to the king, queen and their army - the size of this host is not recorded - was not the pass, but a 20-kilometre gorge further south where the Eisack rushes between towering rocky slopes and narrows at least twice between stony gates before reaching a wide plain at Bozen (Bolzano).

The archaeologists Laura Allavena Silverio and G. Rizzi (see the bibliography below) have presented evidence that the preferred prehistoric detour around this rugged barrier was a path on the left bank of the Eisack that rose to nearly 1,000 metres' altitude to circumvent two ravines, passing via the settlements of Seis and Völs and returning to the valley floor at Blumau (I will use German place-names since the majority population of the location today is German-speaking).

I have drawn a map showing the approximate course of this path (the river outline comes from OpenStreetMap). The prehistoric path - via Seis - is formed by a brown line. It can be see that it continues down the valley crossing two very difficult bluffs, the Gallibichl and the Hochklause. It may be that Cunigunde and Henry used this track, but as we will see, there was at least one other option.

Early in the 3rd century, the Romans built a deviation through the gorge stretching from Kollmann to Blumau. It was no doubt a marvel of engineering, employing two bridges, at Waidbruck and Blumau. These allowed the road to change from the left to the right bank and back to the left to take advantage of the most favourable footing. Other smaller bridges were needed to cross tributaries of the main river. It is represented by the red line on the map.

The entire Kollmann-Bozen road through the valley is known as the Kuntersweg in honour of a late medieval restoration of the Roman route by an enterprising businessman, Heinrich Kunter, and it still remains in use, somewhat widened and straightened with the help of tunnels, as the SS12, an Italian national highway. 

Engineers have progressively widened the gorge in the past thousand years to also accommodate a double-track railway, an autostrada (the Brenner Autobahn) and a cycleway and we no longer see much of the Roman/medieval riverside track, but close attention from a car gives some idea of the obstacles that had to be negotiated. Proceeding downstream, the gorge becomes twisting from Atzwang onwards. In an image on Google Street View (slow loading!), one can see why a tunnel had to be built for today's freeway: there is simply no space in the valley at the left of the picture to accommodate a wide road. 

 It is not uniformly narrow. There are quite a few wide places in the gorge: But in its original state, there were also many gatelike points where the river slipped through fissures and the steep mountain walls left little room for any road. These rock formations jutting into the river's course were the principle obstacles to transit in the prehistoric, Roman and medieval period. I have already mentioned the two located just west of Blumau: the Gallibichl and the Hochklause. From the lie of the river and the location of settlements, I suspect there were formerly such gate points at Atzwang and Steg, but if so they have been quarried away.

This route from Blumau to Kardaun is described in detail by the historian Norbert Mumelter in his brief survey of the Kuntersweg (see the bibliography below). Until explosives were used for the first time in 1607-1608 to blast the Gallibichl and Hochklause, there was no way round these bluffs and they had to be surmounted by steep tracks rising high above the valley floor. Perhaps the Romans operated some kind of mansio (travellers' rest with spare horses for hire) at these bluffs to provide teams of additional horses, mules or oxen to draw carts up the inclines and lower them without crashing on the other side. Kunter and his successors certainly did. Centuries of civil engineering have been needed to defeat these obstacles. Here are some images (slow loading!) from Google Street View and Bing Street Side, firstly of the much diminished Gallibichl:

• from the east, crossed by power lines
• an aerial view showing the houses currently on its top

and secondly of the Hochklause:

• from the east, punctured by the highway tunnel with a small vineyard on top
• the ledge road that was begun in 1607-1608 at the water's edge
• an aerial view showing the vineyard and the two roads.

The existence of any Roman-era deviation along the floor of the gorge has been sometimes doubted, but Allavena Silverio and Rizzi have recently published detailed evidence for it, stating that the remains of the Roman bridge near Blumau are still clearly visible. Segmentum IV of the Peutinger Map (original or redrawn, link at right to Talbert) displays the Roman road through the Eisack Valley with the stops Vepiteno - 35 - Sublabione - 13 - Pontedrusi. The unusually short, 13-mile stage between Sublabione (Klausen, number 275,5 in the Antonine Itinerary) and Pontedrusi (Bozen) is an indication that although not much ground was covered, it was a particularly difficult stage which could occupy a complete day to travel. Mansio Sebatum, the newly opened museum of Roman roads at St Lorenzen, includes the gorge road on its map (much more detailed than the Peutinger) of the Roman-era road network in the area.

However the very knowledge that a Roman road had existed before Kunter's engineers set to work seems to have been lost until the discovery in about 1500 of a Roman milestone on or near the Gallibichl. The engraving on the stone names the soldier-emperor Maxentius and can thus be dated to about 310 CE (Mumelter, 28). It may be that Kunter's business model was to revive Roman roads while giving the impression that he was designer of highways through virgin territory: Mumelter mentions other trade roads with the name Kuntersweg in Austria which may have also been makeovers of Roman routes by Kunter or his relations.

The state in 1013 of the Roman road through the Eisack gorge is impossible to determine. With the abdication of the last western emperor, Romulus Augustus, in 476 and the takeover of Italy by the Germanic warlord Odoacer, Roman imperial control of the Italian highway system ceased, at least in the formal sense that the administration was "imperial". The Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy which succeeded the Empire here may have conducted some minimal maintenance of its roads. The Carolingian empire probably applied funds to maintain one or other heerstrasse since major highways remained a key to political control.

However it can be assumed with good reason that the Roman deviation had become impassable by 1013. As soon as either of the bridges at its endpoints (at Waidbruck or Blumau) collapsed, the road would have become a cul-de-sac. The Eisack is too swift to cross by ferry or fording. Even if that had not happened, the lesser bridges or embankments may have been washed out by floods. Or a rockslide may have ripped away one of the ledges on which the road was built. Or else the road may have been deliberately wrecked in the course of warfare during the five centuries prior to Cunigunde's and Henry's passage.

Whatever happened, it is plain that medieval regional governments lacked the resources - and perhaps the motivation - to tend such a high-maintenance road over the span of more than eight centuries until Kunter arrived on the scene and obtained his concession on 1314 September 22 to clear a footpath through the gorge for pedestrians, mounted travellers, packhorses and cattle. He plainly followed the same route as the Romans had used, restoring the bridges at Waidbruck and Blumau and adding a third crossing at Kardaun, the Feigenbrücke, so that the road could end in the city of Bozen. But in time, Kunter's road also eroded away, prompting a dramatic description by a German priest, Felix Faber, of the terrors of negotiating it (in Latin, quoted by Mumelter). Faber described the sheer drop to his right and a rock wall pressing on his left, as he made his way along the left bank of the gorge towards Jerusalem in April 1480.

Back in Cunigunde's day, large military formations arriving in the region via the Brenner Pass may well have proceeded along the left-bank route following the mountain slope via Seis and Völs, but it is generally believed that medieval Rome-bound German imperial convoys routinely adopted a third route, cutting their way across the Ritten Plateau on the right bank of the Eisack River, 900 metres higher than Bozen. The principal evidence for this alternative upland detour is the existence from about 1200 (long after Cunigunde's passage) of a hospice for travellers at Lengmoos, 1,164 metres above sea level, the highest point of the crossing. After the (re-)opening of the Kuntersweg, traffic across the plateau tailed off and the hospice was converted into a feudal manor of the Teutonic Order of Knights. The current building, the Kommende, dates from the 17th century, and nowadays hosts an open-air theatre show every summer. The exact Ritten route is poorly documented, but is generally held to have begun (when heading downstream) at Kollmann, rising gradually to the plateau via Lengstein, then steeply descending to Rentsch, a suburb of Bozen, joining up with what was later to become Kunter's highway. 

Allavena Silverio and Rizzi advance the reasonable argument that the upland roads on both the left bank and right bank are not only extremely ancient, but that they remained well trodden even when the Roman road led through the gorge in Late Antiquity. A bare track might easily remain in use despite the existence of a well maintained imperial road or heerstrasse in the vicinity. Incentives for certain travellers to "go a different way" would have included avoiding surveillance, tolls and customs duties. Moreover, historians point out that the Roman legions and the cursus publicus always had a prior claim on use of the main road. Besides, the road over the Atwzang, Steg, Gallibichl and Hochklause may never have been safe for heavy carts with wider wheelbases. It may be that the Ritten route was compulsory for "heavy goods vehicles". Near Lengmoos are rocks which local antiquarians say have become rutted from being passed over by countless iron wheels over the centuries.

In terms of altitude, a crossing of the Ritten Plateau was every bit as arduous as crossing the Brenner Pass, but it may not have been as unappealing to the medieval traveller as we might be inclined to think. In our day we assume that the best road is one that reaches its objective with a modest gradient. But this judgement is conditioned by our constant use of motorized vehicles, whether they are cars or trains. When vehicles were drawn by beasts, steep gradients might be accepted because the ideal road was hard-surfaced and free of hairpin bends: stony soil, dry ridgeways, holloways and corduroy were employed so that carts did not bog down or overturn. When the traffic was limbed - pedestrians, mounts and cattle - roads could be even steeper, resembling flights of stairs: the ideal road was the least number of strides where one could maintain a foothold, even if it led up a cliff. 

Last week I tried out the latter class of "good" road: a steep track ascending the 850 metres from Steg, on the edge of the Eisack River up to Klobenstein, which is just above Lengmoos. Klobenstein is the principal town on the Ritten Plateau. Our party of three needed five hours in summer weather with the temperature above 30 degrees celsius to complete the ascent, though the signboard at the start at Steg suggested hikers in good physical condition ought to manage it in half the time. I was nevertheless surprised that the climb could be accomplished in just a morning, and I suppose a complete army could have been taken up such a hill within the space of a day. Our route had of course been cleared for us. The only obstacles were long grass, nettles and sometimes slippery gravel. The track passed the ruins of Burg Stein, a 13th-century castle. In the farmed areas higher up the ascent, the steep path is paved with big, rough stones, probably dating from the 18th or 19th centuries. One supposes that horses were often lashed to death by carters and peasants as the draught teams struggled to haul loads up such routes.

Cunigunde of course saw no castles: the era when Europe's main routes of travel became lined with fortresses was centuries in the future. There were also no paved tracks up the mountain. The royal party, their force of mounted knights and foot-soldiers and all their pack animals probably left the valley floor at Kollmann to gradually climb through the chilly woods to the Ritten Plateau following a route that is still in use today as a narrow, winding, asphalted country road. It would not have been signposted or blazed. The party probably had to rely on local guides or some other form of pilot. 

The queen may not have found the ascent and descent physically strenuous, since she probably rode on one or more palfreys, but it is likely to have been psychologically disturbing to her. 

Modern tourists enjoy the grandeur of the scenery as seen from the Ritten Plateau: a vast, cold grey block of stone, the Schlern, flanked by jagged pinnacles, rises to an altitude of 2,500 metres. Dense evergreen forests, dotted with giant boulders, spill down to the river edge. But to a medieval German queen, the whole scene would have been fearsome and chilling, with the effect heightened by the cold and the fear of attack by enemies or wild beasts. The sheer strangeness of the landscape with the jagged, pale grey crags of the Dolomites seeming so close at hand would have unnerved and frightened her. In the foreground she may well have seen the Ritten's fields of fairy chimneys: bizarre towers of soft rock, many of them five to ten metres high. Each of these pinnacles is topped by a round, hard boulder which has protected the stone below it from erosion by rain. Medieval travellers were told (and believed that) the boulders had been lifted onto the pinnacles by playful giants.

After the exhausting ascent on horseback to Lengmoos, where the army would have set up camp in some more or less level clearing on the plateau, collecting dry timber from the woods for fires and perhaps stealing livestock for food from any peasants who had not fled in time, Cunigunde had to steel herself for the vertigo of a slithering 900-metre vertical descent by an even steeper muddy track from the plateau to the alluvial plain where the Eisack river flows into the Adige river. Her transit of the Alps was neither picturesque nor enjoyable.

Further Reading

Allavena Silverio, Laura, and G Rizzi. ‘La strada romana di Elvas nella viabilità antica della Valle Isarco’. In Archäologie der Römerzeit in Südtirol. Beiträge und Forschungen. Forschungen zur Denkmalpflege in Südtirol, edited by L Dal Ri and S Di Stefano, 511–. 1, 2002.

Mumelter, Norbert. Der Kuntersweg. Bozen: Gemeinde Karneid, 1986.

New-Found Manuscript

Does a publication 10 years ago describing a new-found manuscript count as news? Not for a journalist. Nor ought it to be news when the author of the publication personally drew my attention to the article two years ago. But somehow I was too busy with other things, and only discovered today that the Biblioteca Malatestiana in Cesena, Italy possesses a previously unknown 11th-century manuscript of the Liber Genealogus. So it is news ... to me.

Readers may recall that I published online last year the ur-text of the Liber Genealogus of 427 (link). It is not a critical edition, but it is the first to present the archetypal text of the year 427 without clutter. Those who follow this blog will know that the Liber Genealogus is a strange chronological and genealogical tract which can only be understood if one realizes it was a learned commentary on a wondrous drawing: the Great Stemma.

In 2002, the eminent Italy-based historian-philologist Dr Michael Gorman published an article in the journal Scriptorium on 11th-century manuscripts from the monastery at Monte Amiato, a Benedictine community which was closed in 1782. He argued that three very similar codices had all been drafted in the scriptorium there in the 11th century. His article was re-published in Italian with some revisions in 2007.

The third of the manuscripts which he highlighted was one that had escaped the notice of Theodor Mommsen when he published his edition of the Liber Genealogus at the end of the 19th century. This manuscript at Cesena doubtless contains a copy of the F recension. Giuseppe Maria Muccioli writes in that library's printed catalogue that the text begins: Genealogia totius Sacra Scripturae, cum persecutionibus Christianorum, which echoes the Madrid incipit, Genealogiae totius bibliothecae ex omnibus libris veteris novique testamenti. I discussed the Madrid version in a post in February.

Here is a tabulation of the parallel contents of the three codices, based on the publications of Dr Gorman, Mommsen and Professor José Carlos Martín. The three columns at right represent the folio numbers in:

• Plutei 20.54 
• Conv. soppr. 364 
• Cesena D.XXIV.I (Catalog)

Isidori Hispalensis	Etymologiae (ed. Lindsay)	lost	1- 100v	1- 183
Junilius Africanus	De partibus divinae legis = Instituta regularia divinae legis (CPL 872) (Collins)	1ra - 8rb	100v- 107	183- 193v
Bede (thus identified by Gorman)	Glose per totum alphabetum (Gorman reference: De ortographia, ed. CCSL 123A.7-57)	8rb – 15rb	107- 111v	193v- 201v
Anon	Glossa super Octateuchum et Librum Regum (Glossa Rz: see Holtzmann)	omit	111v- 116	202- 209v
Anon	Divisiones temporum XIII (unpublished)	15rb – 21ra	116- 120	209v- 217
Isidori Hispalensis	Ety. 6.3.2: ''Bibliothecam ... Esdras scriba ...."	21ra	120	217
Isidori Hispalensis	Ety. 7.1.2-37 and 7.2.11-49	21ra – 22va	120- 121v	217- 219
Anon	De litteris (grammatical tract on syllables, vowels, consonants: Qui primum interrogandum est his qui scientiam divinarum scripturarum scire desiderant...)	22va – 24ra	121v	219- 220v
Anon	Liber Genealogus (CPL 2254) (ed. Mommsen MGH chron. min I, pp 160-196; ed. Piggin)	24ra – 30ra	122- 125v	220v- 228r
Isidori Hispalensis	Chronographia, cum prologo; (ed. Martin)	30ra – 34ra	lost	lost
Anon	Catalogus regum Langobardorum et Italicorum Lombardus  (ed. Waitz MGH scr. rer Lang.) ends with last Italian kings Lothair II and Berengar II and the crowning in 961 of Otto II as overlord of Italy	36va – 37ra	lost	lost
Anon	Great Stemma (ed. Piggin)	38r – 45r	lost	lost
Pseudo-Julianus	Ordo annorum mundi (ed. forthcoming, Martín)	45r	lost	lost

It will be obvious from this that the first three-quarters of the Plutei 20.54 manuscript has been lost, whereas the other two manuscripts are lacking their final quarter or third. The folios which we now see numbered 1-45 in the online digital version of Plutei 20.54 were numbered 143-187 when the codex was intact. Possessing all three codices allows us to reconstruct the lost model at Monte Amiato from which they must have been copied.

Gorman notes that the Divisiones temporum XIII above is a text with an annus praesens of 745 CE, matching the legendary date of foundation of the monastery, and argues that this, along with other formal criteria, establishes a clear link between this miscellany and the presumed 11th-century Monte Amiata scriptorium.

Gorman's article is also of interest for its discussion of a medieval diagram which is based on the Great Stemma but adds new content. It was probably made in the same scriptorium. This is found in another Florence manuscript, Cod. Amiatinus 3, ff 169-172v (not online). He notes that this diagram's list of popes finishes with Agapetus (papacy 946-955), and conjectures that this information was drawn from yet another extant manuscript that had been made and kept at Monte Amiata, plut. 65.35, f 3r. (online) which contains a Liber pontificalis.

Note added in 2013:  The latter manuscript is discussed in a later post.

Gorman, Michael. ‘Codici manoscritti dalla Badia amiatina nel secolo XI’. In La Tuscia nell’alto e pieno medioevo. Fonti e temi storiografici ‘territoriali’ e ‘generali’, edited by Mario Marrocchi and Carlo Prezzolini, 15–102. Florence: Sismel - Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007.

------. ‘Manuscript Books at Monte Amiata in the Eleventh Century’. Scriptorium 56 (2002): 225–293: 268–271.

Martín, José Carlos. Isidori Hispalensis Chronica. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003.*67

Mommsen, Theodor, ed. ‘[Liber Genealogus:] Additamentum II [to the] Chronographus anni CCCLIIII’. In Chronicorum minororum saec. IV. V. VI. VII. Vol. 1. Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH), Auctores Antiquissimi (AA) 9. Berlin: Weidmann, 1892.