13
Of Gems and Drinking Cups
Richard A. Leson
On the dorsal of the Account-Inventory’s Roll B, possibly with the input of the dying Eudes of Nevers, a scribe recorded those possessions of greatest personal, symbolic, and monetary value. Beneath the initial written descriptions of gems, jewelry, and reliquaries, we can almost hear the “spoken words, recollections, or negotiations” that took place as the fates of these prized objects were decided.1 Those things of greatest value and significance were destined for family members in France, including “the count’s good sapphire [that] has been sent to the lord of Bourbon.” The preeminent importance of this gem is signified by its notice at the top of the roll, above and before the heading “These are the things that were given away from among the count’s possessions.”2 This lord of Bourbon (see the genealogy in the appendix) was Eudes’s younger brother, John, who was now heir to the comital title of Burgundy. How the sapphire reached him is unknown, but its courier, as signaled elsewhere in the Account-Inventory, might have been the knight Hugh of Augerant, one of Eudes’s three executors.3 In the initial distribution of Eudes’s most precious possessions listed on Roll B, Hugh is the last of six knights to whom the count bequeathed one of his rings. We are also told that “my lord Hugh of Augerant, carries the ring that the duke [Eudes’s father, Hugh IV of Burgundy] had given the count and the ring that should be [given] to the heir of Nevers,” the last presumably Jean Tristan, husband of Eudes’s eldest daughter, Yolande.4 That Hugh “carries” these rings implies that it is he who will deliver them, a mission that conceivably included delivery of the sapphire. At any rate, that Hugh was entrusted with such precious objects is an indication of the high regard in which Eudes held him. That the relationship between the two men was one of trust and affection is further indicated by the fate of another prominent object in the Account-Inventory: Eudes’s luxury drinking goblet, or henap. Multiple references to the henap in the Account-Inventory illustrate the scrutiny paid to the material realities of Eudes’s possessions over the months-long evaluative process. They also exemplify how the “copious carrying capacity that encompassed the economic, emotional, and historical, all anchored to places, people, and moments in time,” extended well beyond precious gems and rings to those more functional objects associated with the count’s person and the dynamic performance of lordship.5
That a powerful lord like Eudes of Nevers owned one or more splendid drinking goblets is to be expected. Created for use in secular settings, henaps are ubiquitous in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century inventories and testaments.6 The finest were made of gold, silver, or silver gilt, though the same term could also refer to wooden (usually maplewood) mazers embellished with precious metal fittings and enamel ornaments, and even to cups made from ivory. Eudes’s great henap is recognized by three (possibly four) separate entries in the Account-Inventory. Together, these entries underscore the editors’ observations concerning word choice and how certain descriptors suggest “valuative and affective valences that reveal even more about [an object’s] meaning.”7 The first reference to the henap appears on the recto (or ventral) side of Roll B, where it is listed with the “things of the count of Nevers that he had the day he went from life to death” and listed among those objects placed “in the hand” of the servant Robet. The fine items that precede it in the list—enamels, gems, a cameo, rings, small golden crosses, a golden chapel set with stones and pearls, two belts made of gold, and two silver water basins—exceeded the value of the henap either in material or personal value or perhaps a combination of the two. It may be that the relatively lesser value assigned the cup was somehow a consequence of earlier confusion about its materials. In this first notice it is described as “1 goblet of silver set with stones and enamels, which was believed to be of gold.”8 The curious phrasing “believed to be of gold” or a version thereof is used in every subsequent notice of the cup in the Account-Inventory. Evidently this “belief” was a defining aspect of the count’s favorite drinking goblet. That it stemmed from an earlier, erroneous appraisal of the cup’s base metal is indicated by the third and fullest description of the cup in the Account-Inventory, made in mid-September (Roll A, dorsal). Here for the first time the silver cup is described as silver gilt (dargent dore), a strong indication that at some point—although it is not clear when—a gilt veneer surface of this silver henap was mistaken for the vessel’s base metal. The phrasing “was believed to be” raises the possibility that the true nature of the base metal was discerned only around the moment of the count’s death, a reality that certainly factored into the relatively modest 25 lb. t. assigned the vessel shortly thereafter.9 Nonetheless, the phrasing “was believed to have been made of gold” (or a version thereof) persists in the inventory. It is tempting to suppose that this language reflected some long-held conviction about the henap’s superior material, one perhaps the result of the great personal value the cup had held for its owner. Were that the case, the Account-Inventory compilers rather discreetly set the record straight.
Though Eudes’s henap is lost, we may draw on the total “linguistic assemblages of nouns and adjectives” in the Account-Inventory to “give shape to each textual thing” and to imagine objects “as they were once made, used, and set in motion.”10 This is a useful exercise where the many types of goblets listed in the Account-Inventory are concerned. There, the term cope (cup) is nearly always modified by the adjective cuvesclee (covered), meaning a goblet with a detachable or hinged lid that could double as a serving vessel. As no henap is characterized as cuvesclee, all objects named in this way presumably lacked covers and served primarily for drinking. We may also assume that most of Eudes’s henaps possessed a relatively wide, shallow bowl and were balanced on a stem and foot, following an ancient typology of drinking goblets (see examples in figure 16, at the top right). Such a configuration finds indirect confirmation on the back (dorsal) of Roll B in an entry for “17 silver goblets without feet [xvii henas dargent sanz pie].” As these are the only cups in the Account-Inventory described in this way, we may suppose that these seventeen silver henaps alone among Eudes’s drinking goblets lacked feet, even if all the other henaps listed are not modified by the descriptor a piet so often attached to the noun henap in contemporary inventories and testaments. Though the majority of henaps to survive from the crusader period are saucer-shaped, silver or gilt-silver drinking vessels (presumably like the seventeen sanz pie), the henap a piet remained common in the mid-thirteenth century and was known in the Levant. When, for example, the dying English knight Hugh de Neville disposed of his possessions in Acre in 1267, he bequeathed to the Temple his “hanap a pe” decorated with the arms of the king of England.11
Because Eudes was in the Levant for a relatively short period before his death, we may reasonably assume that his henap was of French origin rather than an object acquired on crusade. It was set with stones (possibly gems, glass cabochons, or a combination of the two) and enamels, an aesthetic that recalls Limousin champlevé objects of the early thirteenth century.12 Were the henap a more recent creation it might have featured émaux de plique, which is to say small enamel plaques or “buttons” of various shapes created with a technique similar to cloisonné.13 These plaques, produced in Parisian workshops, could be sewn onto clothing or applied to larger metalwork objects as ornamentation. Still other possibilities for the cup’s origins remain. Small, Byzantine enamel plaques or mountings adorn ancient Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic vessels in the treasury of San Marco, objects possibly looted from Constantinople in 1204.14 And we cannot rule out the possibility that the henap was made in Acre, in which case its imagery or decoration might have displayed an eclectic mixture of stylistic and iconographic elements analogous to that in manuscripts attributed to that city during the crusader period, books in which the illuminations betray the influence of Western, Byzantine, and Islamic artistic traditions.15
Whatever its origins, the personal value of the count’s great henap was equal to if not more than its monetary value, at least for Eudes’s household knight and coexecutor Hugh of Augerant. The Account-Inventory’s second reference to the cup, made shortly after the count’s death, reveals that Hugh accepted “the goblet with stones that is believed to be made of gold” in lieu of 25 lb. t. of a total 155 lb. t. owed to him in salary compensation.16 This in-kind payment pales in comparison to that made to Érard of Vallery, Hugh’s more illustrious coexecutor, who accepted multiple luxury objects valued at a total of 206 lb. 13 s. 4 d. t., among them the gold chapel made of stones and pearls listed above the henap in the initial reckonings of Eudes’s possessions, an item appraised at 80 lb. t.17 Regardless of its lesser monetary value, Hugh’s acceptance of the cup suggests that it possessed a personal significance for him as a special reminder of his late lord. Indeed, Hugh’s putative origins in the arrondissement of Nevers and his pronounced role in the transactions recorded in the Account-Inventory hint at a particularly warm relationship with Eudes, perhaps the result of many years of his service to the count. And it was Hugh, it is worth reiterating, who likely undertook the delivery of profoundly symbolic objects like “the ring that should be [given] to the heir of Nevers,” an item presumably associated with the comital dignity and probably intended for the prince Jean Tristan, son of Louis IX and husband of Eudes’s eldest daughter, Yolande.
What is gleaned from the Account-Inventory about the materials, configuration, and meaning of Eudes’s great henap recalls in many ways the only extant drinking goblet with a demonstrable crusader pedigree, an engraved silver-gilt cup discovered in 1982 at Resafa, Syria (figures 27.1 and 27.2).18 Almost certainly the Resafa cup, as it has come to be known, is an earlier creation than the count’s goblet; it has been dated to circa 1200. The Resafa cup was almost certainly of northwestern European facture and, as Eudes’s cup seems to have been, is a henap a piet. It recalls a handful of silver-gilt goblets recovered from European treasure hoards, objects thought to be of English or Scandinavian origin dated around 1200.19 Some such objects offer general parallels for the Resafa cup’s engraving technique, but the vessel’s configuration, dimensions, and repoussé scaling are closest to those of a henap recently offered for sale by Sotheby’s Paris and described—albeit without any provenance—as “French, around 1180.”20
French origins are also probable for the Resafa cup, as indicated by the eleven authentic heraldic shields engraved in its bowl. Most of these refer to lords from the region of Picardy in northern France. The central shield is that of the lords of Coucy or that family’s cadet branch, the Boves of the Amienois. By 1200 both lines could boast an impressive crusader pedigree. Raoul, lord of Coucy, and his uncle Robert of Boves died on the Third Crusade. Raoul’s cousin, the redoubtable warrior Enguerrand II of Boves, died in 1225 a veteran of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Crusades. One of these men, it seems, brought the cup to Outremer, but exactly when remains uncertain. The traditional heraldic argument for the cup’s association with Raoul of Coucy and the Third Crusade is compelling but ultimately not determinative. It may be that the vessel was engraved in 1216, when Raoul’s son Enguerrand III of Coucy supported the future Louis VIII in the prince’s invasion of England, or even as late as 1219, in connection with Enguerrand II of Boves’s foundation of the Cistercian Abbey of Le Paraclet, on the eve of his departure for the Fifth Crusade.21 When and how the cup got to Outremer remains a mystery for now, but it never returned to France. Whether due to financial exigency, disaster, or as a gift, it became the possession of a Syrian woman, a certain Zayn al-Dār, whose name is inscribed in Arabic on the rim. She in turn gave the cup as a votive—perhaps on its own or as a part of a larger bequest—to an otherwise unknown Christian community operating in or near the Ayyubid fortress Qal’at Ja’bar on modern Lake Assad. Then, at some point, the cup traveled some fifty kilometers south to Resafa, ancient center of the cult of Saint Sergius. Why it moved from Qal’at Ja’bar to Resafa is unclear, but as Glenn Peers has insightfully observed, the votive honor initially accrued to Zayn al-Dār doubled as a result, as the cup appears to have been appropriated for Orthodox liturgical use in Resafa’s so-called Basilica A.22 The cup ended up among the basilica’s liturgical furnishings, with which it was buried prior to the destruction of that city by the Mongols in 1258 or 1259.23
This was not the fate of the goblet “which was believed to be of gold,” which probably returned to France. Eudes’s henap and, at least initially, the Resafa cup served a similar purpose: to foster communal, knightly bonds, and to display wealth and status. Though we do not know if the enamel decorations of Eudes’s henap included heraldic shields like those of the Resafa cup, to drink from an object of this sort was to assimilate physically those bonds in an act tantamount to a secular Eucharist. It is tempting to imagine the vessel decorated with the count’s arms—bands of gold and azure blue, surrounded by an indented red border—coupled with the heraldry of his father, brothers, in-laws, and allies.24 No such cup survives for the Nevers family, but we know that they owned luxury objects on which heraldric decorations articulated kinship and marital ties.25 Jean-Bernard de Vaivre, for example, showed that the Limousin enamel escutcheons on a coffret of circa 1258 now in Aachen likely referred to Hugh IV of Burgundy (Eudes’s father) and the husbands and wives of his children. These included the familial arms of Mahaut of Bourbon, Eudes’s wife who brought him the county of Nevers.26
Even if Eudes’s cup lacked heraldic shields, it likely carried powerful, sentimental associations with the count, born perhaps from its role in the performance of knightly oaths of fidelity and trust. This might have been why, at the time of his lord’s death, Hugh selected this particular object as partial compensation for what he was owed. Perhaps he recalled the goblet touched to the count’s lips at table in the house at Acre, or proffered by Eudes to him and others including Érard of Vallery, Geoffrey of Sergines, Gaucher de Merry, Gui de Chantenai, and “mon segnor Copin” to foster morale and camaraderie in the hostile environment that was Acre in the summer of 1266. As ever, a scene from the famous Morgan Picture Bible—that of Joseph’s reception of his brothers in Egypt—is suggestive of such experiences (Figure 16). There, Joseph and his brothers drink from golden cups and converse over a richly set table. This is an image that agrees with how the editors, drawing on an observation by Sarah McNamer, describe the Acre house as a “decidedly masculine space, in which male solidarities were reinforced through naming, gifts, and personal memories.”27 The count’s great henap, we might imagine, was an essential element in the performance of those solidarities and the creation of those memories.
Though the ultimate fate of the henap is unknown, we do know that Eudes’s possessions remained associated with him long after his death. Of this we may be certain from two early fourteenth-century sources. The first is a codicil to the testament of Eudes’s second daughter, Marguerite of Tonnerre, the titular queen of Sicily and Jerusalem, who died without issue in 1308.28 In contrast to the Account-Inventory, Marguerite’s codicil is mostly concerned with the relationships of women, though similar material and familial-social hierarchies apply. Thus, like her father, Marguerite’s most valued gem was a sapphire, in this case given to her by her late husband, Charles of Anjou (d. 1285). It signified the Angevin legacy in the Regno and was therefore left to Marie of Hungary (d. 1309), wife of Marguerite’s stepson, Charles II of Anjou. The next item, however, signified Marguerite’s natal family and was accordingly reserved for her eldest niece, Jeanne of Flanders (ca. 1272/73–1333). The latter, the firstborn daughter of Marguerite’s late sister Yolande (d. 1280), was married in 1288 to the grandson of the same lord of Coucy with whom the Resafa cup is associated. Thus, Marguerite’s codicil reads, “To Jeanne, lady of Coucy, my niece, my small rubies that were my father’s [a Jehenne, dame de Couci, ma niece, mon petit rubbis qui fu monsseigneur mon pere].”29 Eudes must have given these rubies to Marguerite prior to his departure for Acre in 1265, perhaps as an anticipatory wedding gift. Typical clerical exegesis associated the ruby with the blood of Christ or his martyrs, though in this case that interpretation was likely enriched by the stones’ special association with Eudes, his crusading self-sacrifice, and miraculous powers reputedly exercised by his former possessions (see the rubies in figure 18).30 The latter phenomenon is reported by our second source, the Templar of Tyre (active ca. 1315–20), who wrote that physical contact with those objects Eudes had bequeathed to the poor of Outremer could heal the sick.31 Such stories were likely known to Marguerite and informed her own charitable pursuits on behalf of the poor and infirm at her hospital of Notre-Dame-des-Fontenilles, work that probably involved the use of relics and possibly gemstones believed to possess curative properties.32 If, half a century after his death, the possessions Eudes left to the poor of Outremer were still credited with curative powers, so might the rubies Marguerite left to her niece have been a powerful talisman that protected the wearer from sickness and harm. And perhaps, if Eudes’s great henap still existed, its pseudo-sacramental associations were similarly augmented by a miraculous potency born of the piety and generosity of its renowned owner. As it had for Hugh of Augerant, then, the value of the cup “believed to be of gold” continued to exceed that of its materials.
1. Roll B “is as close as we come to a deathbed testament or inventory and reflects Eudes’s most intimate objects and spaces.” See the introduction to this book.
2. Roll B Back.
3. On Hugh, see chapter 5 above.
4. Roll B Back. It is not entirely clear from this phrasing if the ring Hugh IV gave to his son (perhaps a sign of the comital dignity) and the ring intended for “the heir of Nevers” were one and the same, though this seems unlikely. Hugh IV lived until 1272, so the ring he gave to Eudes could have been returned to him (or delivered to John of Bourbon, along with the sapphire?) by Hugh of Augerant.
5. See the introduction to this book.
6. Chrétien Dehaisnes, Histoire de l’art dans la Flandre, l’Artois et le Hainaut avant le XVe siècle, vol. 1 (Lille: L. Danel, 1886).
7. See the introduction to this book.
8. Account-Inventory, Roll B Front.
9. As indicated by the second reference to the cup, on Roll A Front, Part 1. According to the editors’ chronology, written shortly after August 7.
10. See the introduction to this book.
11. See the testament of Hugh de Neville above.
12. For example, the ciborium of Maître Alpais and its analogues. See Susan La Niece, Stefan Röhrs, and Bet Mcleod, eds., The Heritage of “Maître Alpais”: An International and Interdisciplinary Examination of Medieval Limoges Enamel and Associated Objects (London: British Museum Press, 2010).
13. See now Giampaolo Distefano, Esmaltis viridibus: Lo smalto de plique tra XIII e XIV secolo (Savigliano [Cuneo]: L’Artistica editrice, 2021). I am grateful to Barbara Drake Boehm for this suggestion.
14. For an example, see Avinoam Shalem, “New Evidence for the History of the Turquoise Glass Bowl in the Treasury of San Marco,” Persica 15 (1993–95): 91–94.
15. On painting in crusader Acre and its environs, see, inter alia, Jaroslav Folda, Crusader Art in the Holy Land, from the Third Crusade to the Fall of Acre, 1187–1291 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Indeed, the “romance of the Lands of Outremer” noted in the Account-Inventory (Roll A Front, Part 2)—probably a manuscript of Guillaume de Tyr’s Histoire d’Outremer—might very well have been purchased in Acre. See Folda, Crusader Art, 357.
16. Roll A Front, Part 1.
17. Roll A Front, Part 2.
18. Richard A. Leson, “The Coucy, the Boves, and Heraldry’s Coming of Age in the Resafa Cup,” Revue française d’héraldique et de sigillographie—Études en ligne (March 2021): 1–28.
19. See Thilo Ulbert, Resafa III, Der kreuzfahrerzeitliche Silberschatz aus Resafa-Sergiupolis (Mainz am Rhein: P. von Zabern, 1990), 50–59.
20. Compare, for example, the engravings on the two cups attributed to England or Scandinavia in the recent auction catalog Medieval Art in England (London: Sam Fogg, 2019), 19–22 (cat. nos. 7 and 8). For the cup offered in 2011, see Sotheby’s Paris, “Orfeverie Europeenne, boites en or,” May 17, 2011, lot no. 250: “Coupe ronde sur pied en argent vers 1180, probablement France,” https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2011/orfvrerie-europenne-boites-en-or-pf1102/lot.250.html. The current whereabouts of this cup are unknown (it went unsold in 2011). It may be the work of the same hand as the Resafa cup. At first glance, this cup would appear to strengthen the case for the Resafa cup’s creation—and engraving—in northwestern Europe. I am grateful to Thierry de Lachaise of Sotheby’s for answering questions about this object.
21. On these possibilities, see generally Leson, “The Coucy, the Boves.” A connection between the cup’s creation and the 1219 foundation of Le Paraclet—perhaps as a commemoration of a collective crusade vow by Enguerrand and his followers—has yet to receive consideration. On Enguerrand II’s foundation of the abbey, see Anne E. Lester, Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women’s Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 106.
22. Glenn Peers, “Translating Edges in Art of the Medieval Middle East: On the Resafa Hoard and a Painted Bottle from Lichtenstein,” in On the Edge: Time and Space. Proceedings of International Conference, 14–15 November 2014, ed. Zaza Skhirtladze (Tbilisi: Universitetis gamomcʿemloba, 2017), esp. 15–18.
23. Word of such destruction traveled to France rapidly. It animated the imagination of Rutebeuf and became a potent theme in his poems, and in turn ignited a heightened sense of anxiety about the East that led to Eudes’s crusader vow and voyage in 1265. See Rutebeuf’s poems “La complainte de Coustantinoble” and “La desputizons dou croisie et dou descroizie” edited above.
24. We know Eudes’s arms from the counterseal of Yolande, his eldest daughter. See Louis Douët-d’Arcq, Collection de sceaux, 3 vols. (Paris: H. Plon, 1863–68), no. 872 bis. For an image, see Sigilla, http://www.sigilla.org/sceau-type/yolande-bourgogne-contre-sceau-27162, accessed February 2, 2022. See also figures 13.1 and 13.2.
25. Cups with enameled heraldic decorations were probably fairly common. Beatrix of Brabant owned such a goblet at the time of her death in 1289. See Dehaisnes, Histoire de l’art dans la Flandre, 78: “un hanap dor que me dame li Royne de France li dena, qui est a couvercle a esmaus, a pierres et a escus de France, de Brabant et de Bourgogne.”
26. Jean-Bernard de Vaivre, “Le décor héraldique de la cassette d’Aix-la-Chapelle,” Aachener Kunstblätter 45 (1974): esp. 109–20. My thanks to Anne Lester for bringing this article to my attention.
27. See chapter 6, above.
28. Lille, AD Nord, series B 447, no. 4.621. For a transcription, Dehaisnes, Histoire de l’art dans la Flandre, 166.
29. Dehaisnes, Histoire de l’art dans la Flandre, 166.
30. The ruby often shared these allegorical traits with the red carbuncle. See Christel Meier, Gemma Spiritalis: Methode und Gebrauch der Edelsteinallegorse vom frühen Christentum bis ins 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1977), 1:147–50, esp. 150, 247, n. 12. On the affective (as opposed to the allegorical) qualities of gemstones, see now Brigitte Buettner, The Mineral and the Visual: Precious Stones in the Medieval Secular Cultures (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022), 9.
31. TdT, para. 339; and Paul Crawford, The “Templar of Tyre”: Part III of the “Deeds of the Cypriots,” (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003; repr. New York: Routledge, 2016), 48. See above, chapter 7.
32. Lynn T. Courtenay, “The Hospital of Notre Dame des Fontenilles at Tonnerre: Medicine as Misericordia,” in The Medieval Hospital and Medical Practice, ed. Barbara S. Bowers (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 77–106.