7
The Threaded Heart
Converted Objects and Return Journeys
Lamors—the word would have hung in the air; phonetically it could mean both “Love” and “Death.” The poet Rutebeuf begins his lament, his complainte, for Eudes of Nevers with “Lamors.”1 Lamors has its own cadence in the poem, returning as a refrain in nearly every stanza, carrying its twin each time—“Death/Love.” With this word the poet found a powerful singular term to characterize Eudes’s loss and his enduring legacy. Those who knew him, we are told, loved him and lamented his death. The rolls—objects carried in their own right—were a testament to Eudes’s material munificence on display in the East, but also to his connections with those in his retinue, those in France, and those in Acre. As is always the case, objects, especially when enumerated in an inventory, carry with them far more than their individuated specificity: they convey value of many kinds, networks of making and use, memories both public and private, and futures yet to unfold.
Our final task, as it was Eudes’s, is to consider what remained in Outremer and what returned to France. Roll D offers some insight into this, for it records (“Cest li escriz”) “the count’s things that were sold [des choses le conte vendues].”2 Are we to imagine the count is present for these sales, or is this a posthumous list? Unlike Rolls B and C, which are not dated, Roll D notes that the accounts were made on September 15, 1266, thus over a month after Eudes’s death. It could be that the sales were made while Eudes was alive and the accounting finalized later, although that seems less likely. Rather, we are witness to the process of dissolving a baron’s material household, to the legal and financial resolutions at the end of a life. Certainly, Roll D seems our most worksheet-like in that a scribe, or possibly two, at different times, has used the back, the dorsal, of the roll to make two different notes. One in the same hand and ink as Roll B, written upside down, calculates “what the count had in deniers currency and in bezants” on the day he died, noting that this account, that is, this discrete cash sum, was made August 9, 1266, two days after the count’s death. This total appears again incorporated into the full and final sum total of Eudes’s estate at the bottom of Roll D recto. Also on the dorsal side of Roll D is a short list in a different ink, more a note without itemized values, of “the things that are not yet sold [choses qui ne sunt pas ancor vendues]” with a total value given in marks sterling and gold.3 We believe that the dorsal lists were preparatory and thus ancillary to the longer more carefully compiled lists made on Roll D recto.
Six buyers are listed; five are knights, but not all in Eudes’s retinue. Érard of Vallery purchased an assortment of items; most were from the kitchen, including pots, pans, a fork, saucers, goblets and platters, table coverings, and hand towels. He also purchased items from the larder and from among Eudes’s personal things including ten pairs of small gloves, a whistle, and unadorned fabrics. And he bought the donkey, forty chickens, and half of Eudes’s barley stores.4 Érard was most likely providing for his own household and his own lodgings, taking over where Eudes has left off. And there must have been some urgency, for unlike gold, silver, or cloth, barley, chickens, and salted meat cannot last forever. Similarly, Geoffrey of Sergines the elder buys from Eudes’s kitchen and stores, including cauldrons, pans, sides of salted meat, and casks of wine. He certainly had a permanent household in Acre and here is seen to provision it, to buy up Eudes’s stocks that would otherwise have been wasted or given away.5 Hugh de la Baume and Hugh de Mont-Cornet, both knights, made similar small purchases.6
Finally, a vast assortment of objects were sold off from among those things remaining in Eudes’s household: an array of cloth and clothing, food stores, wood for fuel, cases and chests for transport, some armor, many things that were not listed among Eudes’s more public-facing wardrobe items—like undergarments, pairs of shoes, and blouses—as well as the two palfreys and two mules, the one grey horse, and “1 chessboard and chess pieces sold together [i eschaquier et les eschas vendu ensemble]” (see figure 30).7 These items were purchased, but the inventory does not list who bought them. They entered into the material economy of Acre. The Temple, that is, the Templars of Acre, are listed last as purchasers of a series of silver and gold vessels—pitchers, cups, pots—either for their own use, perhaps, or to be repurposed for use in their chapel, or as transportable, pawnable, wealth.8 This final list of transactions was concluded in the presence of the master of the Temple and, as noted on Roll A, the treasurer, and in the presence of Érard of Vallery and Geoffrey of Sergines the younger. Here the Temple is the beneficiary, in a way, of Eudes’s death. They purchased his valuable goods, though it is hard to know how or if the values were reckoned, and finally they collected on his debts. This exchange is illuminating, for the Temple was not a recipient of Eudes’s bequests as listed in Roll C, as the Hospitallers were, but it does receive a large share of his movable goods and portable wealth through purchases. All of these items remained in Outremer, with Eudes’s flesh and bones, not far off in the cemetery of St. Nicholas.
What returned to the West? It is possible that Roll D’s dorsal list of things “not yet sold” made their way west with Hugh of Augerant or Érard of Vallery, both of whom have the cost of return passages noted in Roll A and both of whom, we know, returned to France within the year. The things not yet sold were for the most part small, portable, and of high value. Most were made of gold and silver—including goblets, rings, a chapel of gold, a gold or gilded pitcher, silver and gold cups, and two silver carafes—but they also included opulent cloth, specifically Tartar cloth, hand-worked hangings, coverlets, and the tent from Château Pèlerin, as well as two pairs of trunks and three old chests, which may have been able to contain these items, but we cannot know for certain.9
Two final objects certainly did return to the West: Eudes’s heart and the parchment rolls studied here. In the days after his death, a surgeon and embalmer removed Eudes’s heart from his body. They treated and spiced it, which is to say embalmed it, and threaded and wrapped the heart with cloth of gold (“drap qui i estoit dor et fu percez sor le cuer le conte”).10 His executors purchased a special box (escrin) for 3 and one half bezants to contain it for the return journey to France (see figure 24).11 And someone, possibly Hugh or Érard, carried his heart, relic like, to Cîteaux. There the monks placed Eudes’s heart into a tomb, joining his remains with those of his ancestors, the crusader dukes of Burgundy who had died before him.12 Eudes’s heart moved—separated from his body and his bones—within a narrative and imaginative space built into and upon the penitent ambitions of the crusader’s separated self.13 The circulation of people and objects, of bodies as objects, and of worldly things that became secular relics suffused the crusading Mediterranean and generated what we are calling the material Outremer, constituted by habits of thought, embodied practices of behavior, ritual, comportment, and profound acts of devotion and penance all done in an “other” space, across the sea. Eudes’s death in the East, burial in Acre, and the movement of his embalmed and translated heart served as a pious model for King Louis IX of France, the Count-King Thibaut V of Champagne and Navarre, and Jean Tristan, among other lords who would die on campaign in Tunis in 1270, and whose hearts were likewise separated from their bones and viscera for commemorative burial in the West.14
Might we then imagine Eudes’s father, Duke Hugh IV of Burgundy, present with Eudes’s daughter Yolande and son-in-law Jean Tristan, assembled at Cîteaux to mourn the count? Might they have been there with other family members, knights, and retainers, listening perhaps to Rutebeuf’s complainte performed as a commemoration and celebration of Eudes of Nevers (see figure 31)?15 And someone must have carried the rouleaux into France at this time too, where they served an administrative and memorial function (see figures 1–4). The persistence of these five parchment rolls, which contain so many things whose material imprint and meaning have endured over time, makes this scene worthy of at least some historical imaginative indulgence. It may have been useful for those in the West to have an account and inventory of all the things the count of Nevers had given away that in the words of the Templar of Tyre, “worked miracles … [curing] any sick person who touched his bequests.”16 The material rolls themselves also carry the realities of Lamors: the affective trace of death and love—Eudes’s and those for him—joined together in serial acts of writing, accounting, and remembrance.
1. See the transcription and translation below.
2. Edition, Roll D Front.
3. Edition, Roll D Back.
4. Edition, Roll D Front.
5. Edition, Roll D Front.
6. Edition, Roll D Front.
7. Edition, Roll D Front.
8. For similar examples of reuse, see Laurence Delobette, “ ‘Faites ceci en mémoire de moi’: Calices et testaments du diocèse de Besançon XIIIe–XVe siècles,” in Le miracle de Faverney (1608) l’eucharistie: Environnement et temps de l’histoire, ed. Corinne Marchal and Manuel Tramaux (Besançon: Press Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2010), 95–125.
9. Edition, Roll D Back.
10. Edition, Roll A Front, Part 2; see also Roll A Front, Part 1: “por lespicier qui acira le cuer le conte por [un]guelient et por choses quil [i] m[i]st et por sa peine, vi b̸.” The entry in the inventory for this is especially descriptive, almost a narrative, and thus calls attention to itself. On the practices of embalming and removal of the heart during this period, see Patrice Georges, “L’exérès du cœur dans l’embaumement médiéval occidental,” in “Il cuore / The Heart,” special issue, Micrologus: Natura, Scienze e Società Medievali 11 (2003): 279–86; Katherine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone, 2006), 15–20, and for the case of Chiara of Montefalco, who was also embalmed and whose heart was removed and placed in a box, 39–76. See also Romedio Schmitz-Esser, Der Leichnam im Mittelalter: Einbalsamierung, Verbrennung, und die kulturelle Konstrukion des toten Körpers, Mittelalter-Forschugen 48 (Ostfindern: Thorbecke, 2014); in English: The Corpse in the Middle Ages: Embalming, Cremating, and the Cultural Construction of the Dead Body, trans. Albrecht Classen and Carolin Radtke (Turnhout: Brepols/Harvey Miller, 2020), 229–31, 240–74, 636–42 for the removal and separate burial of the heart.
11. Edition, Roll A Front, Part 1: “Por i escrin achete por porter a Cytiaus iii b̸ demi.”
12. Eudes’s brother Robert II of Burgundy stipulated in his will from 1297 that he wished to have his heart buried at Cîteaux and his body deca mer, in Acre in the cemetery of St. Nicholas, in both cases “next to [his] brother [delès … mon frere].” See above, note 1 in chapter 6.
13. Much more should be said about the movement of Eudes’s heart in relation to the complex and fascinating contemporary romance Le Roman du castelain de Couci et de la dame de Fayel (Jakemés, ca. 1280) and the German analogue, Herzmaere, for Eudes’s is a historical example of such separation. Marisa Galvez offers a marvelous discussion of this text and its crusading context, Marisa Galvez, The Subject of Crusade: Lyric, Romance, and Materials, 1150 to 1500 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 87–97, and she treats the themes more broadly throughout. For the text, see Jakemés, Le Roman du Castelain de Couci et de la Dame de Fayel par Jakemes, ed. John E. Matzke and Maurice Delbouille (Paris: SATF, 1936). The fundamental study is Helen Solterer, “Dismembering, Remembering the Châtelain de Coucy,” Romance Philology 46 (1992): 103–24. On the German tradition, see Claire Taylor Jones, “Relics and the Anxiety of Exposure in Konrad von Würzburg’s Herzmaere,” Journal of English and German Philology 116 (2017): 286–309.
14. Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “Authority, the Family, and the Dead in Late Medieval France” French Historical Studies 16 (1990): 803–32.
15. Rutebeuf, “La complainte dou conte Hue de Nevers,” in Bastin and Faral, Onze poèmes, 69–75; and here below.
16. TdT, para. 339.