Decidedly Grim

Today’s Exhumed Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Charlemagne (742-814), Charles le Magne, King of the French and Holy Roman Emperor, was in his beloved Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen) when he first felt a severe pain in his chest. He could not be persuaded to take any of his doctors’ remedies and, believing that abstinence would ultimately cure him, refused all food. When he realized that he was not going to recover, Charlemagne called for the Archbishop of Cologne to administer the Holy Sacrament. Though weak, he made the sign of the cross, joined his hands together in prayer and said, “Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.” The dead emperor was buried, with much pomp, in the church of St. Mary at Aix, his seven-foot frame magnificently clad in royal robes.

In 997 the Emperor Otto III had Charlemagne’s tomb at Aix opened. “Charles the Great was seated upright like a living person in a chair, and was crowned with a golden diadem; his hands were covered with gloves through which the nails had grown; in his right hand he held a sceptre, his sword was by his side, and on his knees was a manuscript of the Gospels. We paid our homage in the act of kneeling. All the limbs were in perfect preservation, but a small portion of the bridge of the nose was missing; this was replaced by gold.” Before he left, Otto removed one of Charlemagne’s teeth as a memento.

The tomb was opened again by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, in the 12th century, when Charlemagne’s bones were placed in a silver chest. In the 19th century Empress Josephine visited Aix and was presented with Charlemagne’s scapula in which was set a piece of the true cross enclosed in a crystal as large as a turkey egg, attached to a gold chain which had once hung around the emperor’s neck.

Culled from: Death: A History Of Man’s Obsessions and Fears

Facts