An account of the political and military events leading to the destruction of the evacuated documents of the Naples State Archives by German soldiers in September 1943. The nature of the lost material, especially the registers of the Angevin dynasty, and subsequent attempts to recreate what can be known of this material.

An analysis of the events that led to the Irish Civil War of 1922−3 and the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland in the opening days of the fighting. A description of what was lost and the background to the formation of the Public Record Office. The efforts of scholars since 1922 to recreate whatever can be recreated of the record.

This chapter considers the physical production of writing in a pre-print world, from the clay tablets of Mesopotamia through the papyrus scrolls of antiquity to the birth of the parchment codex in the early Christian period. There follows a discussion of the speed and number of scribes in the world of the medieval parchment book.

An account of the German bombardmentof Strasbourg in 1870 and the destruction of its medieval manuscript collections, focusing on Herrad of Landsberg’s Hortus deliciarum, an enormous illustrated encyclopedia made for the nuns of Herrad’s convent. Analysis of the contents and pictures of the work and the efforts made to record it before the destruction.

A detailed analysis of the medieval material in the Municipal Library at Chartres destroyed in the US air raid of 1944. This serves as an introduction to many aspects of the intellectual life of the Middle Ages. Discussion of work on the intellectual world of Chartres and of the birth of American Romantic medievalism.

An account of the RAF raid on Hanover in October 1943 that resulted in the incineration of the Ebstorf Map, kept in the State Archive there, followed by a history of the work done upon this medieval world map from the time of its rediscovery in 1834 until its destruction, emphasizing the role of photography. A comparison with the surviving Hereford World Map.

Some works survive by a thread. The Beowulf manuscript is a good example of how tenuous our knowledge of the medieval past can be, as it survives in only one manuscript that was very nearly incinerated in the Cottonian fire of 1731. The chapter describes the knowledge that existed of the manuscript prior to that – virtually none – and the scholarly work done on it since then.

Chapter five moves to the third main theme of the book, that of Aachen itself. Where earlier scholars took note of only a few sources, Sulovsky reconstructs Barbarossa’s crown chandelier, known as the Barbarossaleuchter, on the basis of findings ranging from annals, charters, liturgical books and theological literature to the visual and textual consonances of the chandelier with other parts of the Marienkirche in Aachen. This demonstrates deep traditionalism of Aachen, including the link between Aachen’s Carolingian dome mosaics, Alcuin’s commentary on the Apocalypse that was its textual counterpart and exposition, and the Barbarossaleuchter, which imitates both the dome and the commentary numerologically and visually. By using the annals of Aachen, a text barely noticed by historians, the dating of the chandelier’s inauguration is established. The chapter shows how Saladin’s emissaries were kept in attendance during Easter 1174, when the chandelier was being dedicated, so that Barbarossa could have Arabic representatives present. This was done in order to imitate Charlemagne’s cordial relationship with the Arab caliph Harun al-Rashid, who had given his Christian counterpart two golden candelabra, which Charlemagne then dedicated to the Virgin of Aachen. Thus, Frederick was not trying to sacralise the Empire, but to follow Charlemagne’s example.

The third chapter delivers a reassessment of the cult of Charlemagne from his death in 814 to Frederick Barbarossa’s accession in 1152. The use of local Aquensian and regional Lotharingian material shows that the widely known developments of the memory of Charlemagne had a particular regional and unique local tendency. Sulovsky’s focus in this chapter is on the Karlsdekret, a forgery pretending to be Charlemagne’s foundation charter for the city and convent of Aachen. Where historians previously dated it to before about 1147, Sulovsky affirms that the forged seal of Charlemagne, the Karlssiegel, which dates to the late 1120s, must have been impressed on the original copy of the forgery. Thus, the forgery was an imitation of an imperial charter, and it was designed to impress Lothar III in 1127. This small find redates and reshapes all of what we know about the rise of the cult of Charlemagne in crusade-era Europe. Aachen had a particular stake in shaping the memory of its most famous patron, but it also wielded an influence over it as it contained his tomb.

The second chapter continues the investigation of sacrum imperium, demonstrating that while the imperial chancery used the term more and more frequently, it was only the strong Italian presence at court that kept influencing the imperial notaries to use it and other correlated terms. It is also made clear that the converse was true: when there were no Italians at court, this kind of terminology was not used, even as late as the 1220s. The investigation shows, contrary to expectations, that cities where this terminology was used could be identified, and occasionally even individuals could be pinpointed. Moreover, the presence of courtiers or diplomats from the city of Rome is clearly correlated to the appearance of the tripartite title of the Empire (sacrum Romanum imperium and sacrum imperium Romanum). Thus, the most commonly used title of the Empire for most of its existence was not only invented by the Romans, as Jürgen Petersohn demonstrated, but it was also propagated by them to the rest of the Empire and the world.

In the fourth chapter, Sulovsky turns to the supposedly imperial saints’ cults of the 1160s: the Three Kings and Saint Charlemagne. The chapter demonstrates that the cult of the Magi was unconnected to the emperor. Rather, the agency of Rainald of Dassel in bringing the Magi to Cologne was related to his personal suffering from the Milanese while he was imperial legate in their city on the eve of Epiphany (= Three Kings’ Day). As this was liturgically already the vigils of Epiphany, and as Rainald was trapped in the imperial palace next to the saintly bodies before he barely escaped, he translated the Magi to honour his protectors. This debunks the Kulturkampf-inspired theory that the purpose of worshipping the holy kings who adored Christ long before the apostles were called would help achieve a sacral independence of the Empire from the Papacy. On the other hand, the cult of Saint Charlemagne is shown to have been accepted at the imperial court as a part of a plan to mend the Alexandrine schism by launching an Anglo-Franco-German crusade, which was thought of as an imitation of Charlemagne’s exploits in the east.