The Creation of a Myth: The Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle
Turpin, a corruption of the name Tilpin or Tulpin, was Archbishop of Reims in 748 CE until his death around 800. He was a powerful Abbot at the court of Charlemagne and for centuries was considered to be the author of the Historia Caroli Magni, more well-known today as the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle. Throughout much of the Renaissance, Turpin was a stock literary character: the guarantor of the authenticity of Charlemagne’s great deeds and historical legacy.
Humanist criticism has demonstrated, however, that Turpin could not have authored the Chronicle, for the word “Lotharingia,” denoting a successor kingdom to portions of the former Carolingian Empire, which appears throughout the text of the Historia, did not exist prior 855. Another anachronism is a form of musical notation written on four lines, also referenced in Historia, that did not date back further than 1022. The conspicuous absence of any reference to the sweeping scope and rich content of the Historia, or of its attribution to Turpin, throughout 9th and 10th centuries also certainly inspires skepticism about its precise date; it is far more likely that the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle was the work of a forger and Carolingian apologist of the late 12th century at the very earliest. Over two hundred early manuscript copies survive from that period onwards.
Turpin’s own biography and literary works appeared in various printed publications throughout the 16th century, including the Germanicarum rerum quatuor celebriores vetustioresque chronographi (Frankfurt, 1566), a fine copy of which, bound in contemporary blind-stamped pigskin, is preserved in Johns Hopkins University’s Bibliotheca Fictiva collection. That volume, as its Latin title suggests, anthologizes Turpin with three other early medieval, pro-imperial Franco-Germanic chroniclers, all of whom were Benedictines: the Abbott Regino of Prüm (and later of St. Martin’s in Trier, d. 899), Lambert of Hersfeld (d. 1085), and the long-lived Sigebert of Gembloux (d. 1112). The title page specifies that these four historians’ works were amended and reprinted with a new index, denoting prior imprints variously printed together or separately in Latin or in vernacular translations. A long introductory letter in the 1566 edition by the publisher Simon Schardius (1535-73), and dedication to Duke John Albert I of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (1525-76), precedes the biographical sketches of the four medieval chroniclers.
The 1566 Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle is written as a kind of medieval literary chanson de geste (“song of heroic deeds”). It opens with a letter by the “blessed” Archbishop Turpin (“beati Turpini Archiepiscopi ad Leoprandum”) and concludes with the final res gestae and death of Charlemagne himself. The text combines verse and prose across 32 chapters, a number of which outline the success of Charlemagne’s armies over would-be Saracen invaders of his territories. According to the Chronicle, after Charlemagne emancipates Spain from the Saracens, the African king Agolant succeeded in reconquering the country only to be beaten back once more by a formidable Carolingian force. Turpin also recounts the famous episode of the Frankish paladin Roland, Charlemagne’s nephew, immortalized in the seminal 11th-century French verse La chanson des Roland, blowing his storied “oliphant” to warn Charlamagne’s army of the defeat of his forces at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass.
The original language of Pseudo-Turpin’s Chronicle is Latin, which was, as historian Jo Williams sums, “the language of prestige in several early cultures, although it may not have been the language of the masses.” Although the original Latin is the most common, several translations appeared over the course of the late Middle Ages—including works in French, Provençal, Spanish, Catalan, and even Irish—reflecting a growing historical and genealogical source text that grew to become particularly attractive to nobles and ecclesiastical elites by the late 12th and early 13th centuries in particular. Its likely composition of the Psuedo-Turpin Chronicle, c. 1130, is predicated upon the text’s mention of pope Calixtus II (d. 1124), and was, as the medievalist Stephen H.A. Shepherd has argued, almost certainly the work of a monk.
Beyond the level of generic imitation, the precise textual relationship between the Pseudo-Turpin and the Chanson de Roland is not entirely clear, though it is certainly possible that the latter-day author of the Chronicle drew upon various passages from the Chanson. Certain of the more imaginative literary aspects of the latter—such as the Chaonson’s emphases on Ganelon’s treachery and Roland’s pride—are entirely omitted from the 1566 Chronicle.
Despite the pseudo-authorship of Turpin, he nevertheless became widely identified as an important and well-known Frankish authority owing to the popularity of the Historia across much of Europe. Turpin became a thematic basin to draw from, often recurring in Italian Renaissance verse as a legendary father of epic poetry, particularly as a leading chronicler of Christian wars against the Arabs in Spain. By the era of Pulci, Boiardo, and Ariosto, it became a conventional, almost formulaic, gesture to appeal to Turpin’s authority as an historical witness (e.g., Ancroia, I 42: “Come dimostra Torpin nel suo dire;” Zatti 176-177).
—Giulia M. Cipriani
Bibliography
Arthur Freeman, Arthur Freeman, Bibliotheca Fictiva: A Collection of Books & Manuscripts relating to Literary Forgery, 44 BC–AD 2000 (Quaritch, 2014), no. 176; Stephen H.A. Shepherd, “The Middle English ‘Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle’.” Medium Aevum 65 (1996): 19-34; Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Forging the Past: The Language of Historical Truth in Middle Ages,” The History Teacher 17 (1984): 267-283; Jo Williams, “Classifying The Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 51.7 (2013): 760-786; Sergio Zatti (1990). “Il ruolo di Turpino: poesia e verità nel Furioso” in Il Furioso fra epos e romanzo. (Maria Pacini Fazzi, 1990): 173-212.
