Chapter IV: “We Have Come to Rue your Prowess, Roland!”: The Battle of Roncevaux Pass and La Chanson de Roland (778/1115)

0.     Five different versions of the speech, all of them written down after the fact, have survived. They differ widely.

0.     See Extract 8.

0.     Throughout nearly a millennium of Muslim rule, the Armenians had stayed resolutely Christian.

0.     A dilemma brilliantly elaborated upon by Tom Holland in his 2019 book, Dominion.

0.     Even today, radical revanchist Muslims refer to Westerners collectively as “Franks.”

0.     Voltaire famously and derisively observed that the kingdom was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire, but that is not true. At a time when there were still pagan tribes in Europe, it was Christian; it was founded—literally, as in the case of Charlemagne’s capital of Aachen/Aix-la-Chapelle—on Roman towns; and it was indeed an empire, lasting in one form or another until its formal dissolution in 1806. That was two years after Napoleon became emperor of the French, wearing a gold laurel wreath on his head and holding aloft a replica of Charlemagne’s crown at his anointment by Pope Pius VII, thus explicitly inheriting the mantle of both the Roman emperors and Charlemagne. The ceremony was held at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris.

0.     According to Roland scholar and translator Gerard J. Brault, “Writing about 1125, William of Malmesbury relates that a cantilena Rolandi was sung before the Battle of Hastings [1066] to incite William the Conqueror’s men to emulate the French hero. It is not certain that this work was the Song of Roland. However, other evidence also suggests that the poem had the power to stir up combatants and was composed with the warrior class in mind.”

0.     Although the Reconquista was not completed until 1492, it was well underway by the ninth century, when the most significant remaining Muslim stronghold was centered on the modern city of Saragossa near the Ebro River, which at the time of Hannibal had been the border between the Carthaginians and the Romans. The Ebro was also a crucial battleground during the Spanish Civil War of the twentieth century. The myth of a prolonged and beneficent Muslim “golden age” in Spain is exactly that.

0.     In this ending, as we shall see, Roland was not unlike George Armstrong Custer. And in his stubborn refusal to summon help, he is the spiritual father of General Gordon at Khartoum—as we also shall see.

0.   To provide a flavor of the Old French, the last two lines read: “Paien unt tort e chrestiens unt dreit / Malvaise essample n’en serat ja de mei.”

0.   “No tonsured person who ever sang mass / was personally responsible for so many meritorious deeds” (laisse 119).

0.   The Oxford text here is unclear.

0.   Turold of Bayeux, a Norman poet and possibly the name of the poem’s author; scholars are uncertain.

0.   Older Americans surely recall actor Richard Boone as Paladin in the popular television series Have Gun—Will Travel (1957–1963).

0.   In a bit of historical irony, the Italian island of Lampedusa—which lies just off the Libyan coast—has borne the brunt of the “migrant” crisis in Italy beginning around 2011. In the constant conflict between the northern and southern sides of the Mediterranean, not to mention between the West and Islam, not much has changed since the Punic Wars.

0.   In this same long period (c. 1854–80, Hugo also wrote his stunning, unfinished epic poem, Dieu et la fin de satan (God and the end of Satan), originally intended as part of the larger work.