Word & Image

A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry

ISSN: 0266-6286 (Print) 1943-2178 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/twim20

Mimetic bodies: repetition, replication, and

simulation in the marriage charter of Empress
Theophanu

Eliza Garrison

To cite this article: Eliza Garrison (2017) Mimetic bodies: repetition, replication, and
simulation in the marriage charter of Empress Theophanu, Word & Image, 33:2, 212-232, DOI:
10.1080/02666286.2017.1304796

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2017.1304796

Published online: 22 Jun 2017.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 78

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=twim20

Download by: [Middlebury College] Date: 01 July 2017, At: 12:35

Mimetic bodies: repetition, replication, and
simulation in the marriage charter of Empress
Theophanu
ELIZA GARRISON

Abstract As an object and as a collection of text and images, the marriage charter of Empress Theophanu (Wolfenbüttel,
Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv, 6 Urk 11) relies on replication, repetition, and doubling to reinforce the meanings relayed in its text
and to enhance its function as a legal document. This article argues that the charter’s remarkable illusionism functioned as a kind of
visual rhetoric that was entirely in tune with the terms of the golden text that stretches across its surface. Such a powerful coalescence
between text and image was especially well suited to the visualization and propagation of imperial authority, and it girded expectations
of Theophanu’s obedience at the political, social, and physical levels. Framed in terms that name and foreground God-the-craftsman’s
creation of humankind as the originary mimetic act, creation becomes a template for the order of the Ottonian court. The marriage
charter was thus a call to Theophanu and Otto II to internalize both biblical and Platonic models of creation in the interest of
preserving and perpetuating the Saxon imperial line, which was, at the time of the charter’s presentation, but ten years young. In
explicating the various ways in which the marriage charter’s images and text hinge on themes of repetition and replication, this article
will make a case for the political stakes of mimesis.

Keywords Empress Theophanu, Emperor Otto II, Ottonian art, mimesis, marriage charter

On Sunday, April 14, 972, exactly a week after Easter, the

twelve- or thirteen-year-old Theophanu, a niece of the
Byzantine Emperor John Tzimiskes, was wed to the seven-
teen-year-old co-emperor Otto II at St Peter’s in Rome. She
was crowned co-empress on this day.1 The ceremony, which
Pope John XIII performed, came at the end of a protracted
and contentious series of marriage negotiations between the
Ottonian and Byzantine empires. At the wedding Theophanu
received a luxurious illuminated marriage charter, which was
first presented to her as a rotulus that would have been bound
with a cord, sealed with an imperial bull, and possibly con-
tained in a custom-made case in the manner of official corre-
spondence from the Byzantine court (figure 1).2 The document
is strikingly illusionistic: with its background painted to simulate
purple Byzantine silk, its “embroidered” edges, and its golden
text, the charter’s various makers made clear the preciousness
of its content.3
At some point during the marriage ritual, the seal on the
rotulus would have been broken and the Latin text of the
charter, which was written in the voice of the groom, would
have been read aloud to Theophanu and to the rest of the
guests in attendance that day. As decorative as the work may
appear to us today, the charter marked legally the union
between Theophanu and Otto II, and among other things it
documented the territories she was to receive for her faithful
and obedient hand in marriage. After the wedding, as the
couple made their way north of the Alps and into Franco-
Saxon territory, the charter would have been displayed and
read aloud at key stops on the imperial itinerary as Theophanu
was officially presented to the Ottonian nobility.4 Theophanu,
whose native language was Greek, had had perhaps about a
year (maybe even less) prior to the wedding to learn the
languages spoken and used in the Ottonian imperial court;
the meanings of the charter’s language may not have made
much sense to her when she first heard it.5
As an object and as a collection of text and images,
Theophanu’s marriage charter relies on replication, repetition,
and doubling to reinforce the meanings relayed in its text and
to enhance its function as a legal document. I propose that the
charter’s remarkable simulative qualities functioned as a kind
of visual rhetoric that was entirely in tune with the terms of the
golden text that stretches across its surface.6 Such a powerful
coalescence between text and image was especially well suited
to the visualization and propagation of imperial authority, and
it girded expectations of Theophanu’s obedience at the politi-
cal, social, and physical levels. Framed in terms that name and
foreground God’s creation of humankind as the originary
mimetic act by a divine craftsman, creation becomes a tem-
plate for the order of the Ottonian court. The marriage charter
was thus a call to Theophanu and Otto II to internalize both
biblical and, as I will show, Platonic models of creation in the
interest of preserving and perpetuating the Saxon imperial line,
which was, at the time of the charter’s presentation, but ten
years young.7 In explicating the various ways in which the
marriage charter’s images and text hinge on themes of repeti-
tion and replication, this article will make a case for the
political stakes of mimesis.
As I argue, the strident imitation of precious materials in
Theophanu’s marriage charter indicates that mimesis as an
ideal helped shape Ottonian artistic culture. The interpretation
of this ideal and its attendant meanings have changed over

WORD & IMAGE, VOL. 33, NO. 2, 2017 212

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2017.1304796

# 2017 Taylor & Francis

time, and yet the art of the early and high Middle Ages, and
that of the Ottonians in particular, has gone unnoticed in
otherwise rich examinations of a concept that has served alter-
nately as a goal or point of resistance in the history of Western
art.8 Mimesis equated art-making with the imitation of things
in the world, and the charter’s imitative qualities suggest that
this ideal could exist alongside the proscriptions of the Second
Commandment, which admonished the faithful against making
a likeness of any living thing. Far from preventing medieval
artists from making images at all, however, these seemingly
conflicting directives fostered an artistic culture that prized
copying, simulation, and the creation of replicas; the very act
of creating a copy was sacred.9 This partially explains the
relative abundance of Ottonian artworks that convincingly
simulate the appearance of other objects and materials, as
opposed to the faithful reproduction of, for example, individual
facial features. The story of creation, with which the text of
Theophanu’s charter commences, involves God’s making of
Adam in His own image (imago), and medieval intellectuals
likened this model/copy relationship to that between a seal
and its imprint.10 The marriage charter’s simulative illusion-
ism—its skillful mimicry of the appearance of precious objects
and materials—echoed its call to Theophanu to understand
her function at court as both a faithful helpmeet and a fecund
imperial body.
From skin into silk: the marriage charter’s
materials and forms
Like so many artworks created for Ottonian patrons,
Theophanu’s marriage charter is both visually dazzling and
intellectually sophisticated. And yet the object is unique: no
other such charter exists. Specialists do not agree on where it
was made, but it seems possible that painters at monastic scrip-
toria in Trier or Echternach would have been in a position to
paint parchment that could simulate woven silk and other pre-
cious materials.11 Ordinarily a legal document such as this char-
ter would have been penned in a special notarial script on a
piece of blank parchment, but the marriage charter’s scribe, who
learned his trade at Fulda, used golden book miniscule and
capitalis rustica after the document’s language had been formu-
lated by Ottonian courtiers and notaries.12 Since the marriage
negotiations between the Ottonian and Byzantine houses
dragged on for roughly five years, during much of which time
the Ottonians were holding out for a princess born to the
Byzantine emperor and empress in the porphyry-lined birthing
chamber in the imperial palace in Constantinople,13 Anthony
Cutler and William North have suggested that the body of the
“silk” could have been prepared early on in this process; the
document could therefore have been created just as easily for
Princess Anna, who had been the desired bride for Otto II, as it
was for Theophanu.14 Indeed, this point reminds us that the
work was conceived with a Byzantine imperial bride in mind:
from the perspective of the Ottonian court, this bride was more
of a fertile body with a desirable and rare pedigree than an
individual person.15 Like the charter’s silken foundation, it is also
possible that its text’s bare bones were drafted in advance and
revised over time: the long marriage negotiations outlined below
provided ample time to prepare the charter’s language, and this
could conceivably have been adjusted in the weeks leading up to
the ceremony. We will never know for certain, but it is plausible
that the charter’s artists and scribe were summoned to Rome
from their respective workshops north of the Alps to paint its
ground and to pen its golden text.16
Whoever created the body of the marriage charter was draw-
ing upon the format and deep purple color of the Ottonianum
(figure 2), which was made for Otto I on the occasion of his
imperial coronation at St Peter’s in Rome in 962. At this
ceremony, the newly crowned emperor presented the document
to John XII; it reaffirmed the privileges the pope had held since
Charlemagne’s reign.17 The relationship between the Ottonianum
and Theophanu’s marriage charter is clear, and yet the people
who designed the charter were also aware of the form and style
of official correspondence from the Byzantine court, such as the
sumptuous letter written on behalf of the Emperor John
Komnenos to Innocent II in 1139 (figure 3).18 Not least, the
form of the marriage charter recalls the format and appearance
of southern Italian liturgical scrolls (figure 4).19 As Nino
Zchomelidse has shown, the combination of text and image in
such scrolls, along with their unfurling in the celebration of the
Easter mass, was theologically aligned with processes of divine
revelation.20
None of the charter’s relationships to its models is entirely
direct, however, meaning that it is formally in conversation
with other traditions, but it is nonetheless distinct from all of
them. By any standard, then, the marriage charter is as inno-
vative and artful as it is bound to tradition and focused on
replication. Measuring 114.5 centimeters long by 39.5 centi-
meters wide (just under five feet long by 15.5 inches), it consists
of three pieces of parchment.21 After these pieces were cut
down to size, they were glued together and then painted a
rich purple. Pigments derived from madder and minium were
used to paint the document’s front; the reverse was painted
with a layer of purple pigment derived only from madder.22
These pigments simulated the effects of murex purple dye,
whose use in the West was restricted solely for luxury goods
made specifically for the Byzantine emperor. In this work,
simulation became a mark of authority and control: unable to
access murex purple for themselves, Ottonian artists set to the
task of devising a material alternative.
After the extensive preparation of the parchment’s purple
ground, the document was painted to simulate a swath of
Byzantine silk, and it would have certainly resembled many of
the precious items that Theophanu would have brought with her
from Constantinople.23 Beneath the golden script there are seven-
and-a-half pairs of purple roundels. These are framed by alter-
nating cruciform foliate forms painted a rich indigo; these forms
WORD & IMAGE 213
Figure 1. The marriage charter of Empress Theophanu, 972. Parchment. 144.5 × 39.5 centimeters. Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv, Wolfenbüttel, 6 Urk 11.

214 ELIZA GARRISON

Figure 2. Ottonianum, February 13, 962. Parchment. 100 × 40 centimeters. Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Rome, A.A., Arm. I–XVIII, 18r.

WORD & IMAGE 215

Figure 3. Correspondence from Emperor John II Komnenos to Pope Innocent II, 1139. Parchment. 399.9 × 35.2 centimeters. Archivio Segreto Vaticano,
Rome, A.A., Arm. I–XVIII, 402r.

216 ELIZA GARRISON

Figure 4. Commemoration of temporal authority, miniature from the Exultet (Easter Proclamation) of Bari, 11th century. Archivio Capitolare, Bari. © DeA
Picture Library/Art Resource, New York.

WORD & IMAGE 217

Figure 5. Detail of figure 1 showing the upper border of the marriage charter of Empress Theophanu.
run through the charter’s center and appear “halved” at the
work’s outer edges, and they thus follow the model of mirroring
and splitting that we see in the rest of the images on the body of
the charter’s “silken” surface. At the bottom of the document, the
charter’s repeating patterns are truncated to enhance its trompe-
l’œil effect and to make it appear as if the charter were cut from a
bolt of actual silk. The pair of “split doubles” at the bottom of the
silk lend the roundels a visual dynamism that is tied to the
predictability of the pattern’s repetition and replication.
The roundels contain alternating pairs of dominant male
animals and hybrid beasts—griffons and lions—subduing
acquiescent does and cows. The animal figures in the roundels
mirror each other: the pairs on the left face left and those on
the right face right. Each set of animals and the roundels that
contain them thus appears as a reflection of its partner. The
battles between dominant male and submissive female crea-
tures repeat in symmetrical and orderly fashion. Here, it is
struggle that girds the message of the golden text, which speaks
of a political and marital harmony that is tied to Theophanu’s
charge to bear children and to keep the marriage bed clean
(see the appendix):
Likewise the Apostle judges: “Honorable is marriage and
spotless the marriage bed.” And many other witnesses from
the holy books affirm that the bond of the marriage pact
should happen with God as its author and endure in mutual
and indissoluble love for the procreation of children.
This duty is presented as a reflection of a heavenly order.24
Much like the body of the charter, its edges evoke numerous
precious things: embroidered silk, carved ivory, hammered gold,
and cloisonné enamel. Anna Muthesius’s work on Byzantine silks
has shown that silk clothing was often edged with gold-embroi-
dered borders that contained small pictures, and the small
medallions at the document’s upper edge may have evoked
this practice (figure 5).25 These medallions contain busts of
Christ, Mary, and John the Evangelist26—who are all flanked
by four additional medallions of prophets or apostles—and also
recall the richness of Byzantine cloisonnés such as those that frame
the cover of the Pericope Book of Henry II (figure 6). Anton von
Euw has noted their remarkable similarity to the portrait round-
els on the sixth-century Byzantine ivory diptych of Justinus
housed in Berlin.27 The central three medallions of Christ,
Mary, and John together form a Deesis, which was a nod to
Theophanu’s Byzantine heritage, and which was perhaps icono-
graphically keyed to the singing of protective liturgical acclama-
tions—the Laudes regiae—at the combined coronation and
218 ELIZA GARRISON
wedding ceremony.28 Southern Italian liturgical scrolls, whose
format certainly informed the appearance of the marriage char-
ter, also typically contain Deesis imagery as well as borders
decorated with small medallions of holy figures (figure 4).29
Alternating pairs of peacocks and leonine quadrupeds separate
these medallions and are Eucharistic references; their positions
as mirror images of each other are formally in concert with their
larger combative “silken” analogues in the main body of the
charter.
Given the simulative qualities of the forms on the “silk” of
the marriage charter, it is not surprising that scholars of this
work have tried to pinpoint their exact origins; however, every
iconographic road seems to lead to multiple other paths.30
What has gone hitherto unexamined in the large body of
literature on the marriage charter is the powerful coalescence
of text, image, and illusionism in relation to the expectations it
placed on the young bride.
Cutler and North’s joint study of the marriage charter sees
its text and images as “discrete phases in the production of an
extraordinary document for an extraordinary diplomatic
event.”31 That is, for these authors the relationship between
the object’s imagery and its text is coincidental. Although the
present argument diverges from Cutler and North on this point
—at the very least, the author(s) of the document’s text took a
great deal of inspiration from the images on its ground—they
were absolutely correct to complicate our understanding of the
various stages of production that would have been involved in
creating a work like the marriage charter. Hiltrud
Westermann-Angerhausen, who in several studies has asso-
ciated the illuminators of the charter with Trier, has acknowl-
edged the various iconographic sources for the silken forms on
the charter’s ground. Further, she has reminded us that the
marriage charter is distinctly and artfully “Ottonian”; its
“Byzantine” appearance is a confection. By the time the mar-
riage charter was created, Westermann-Angerhausen points
out, artists working in all media in the Ottonian empire—
manuscript illuminators, scribes of sacred texts, goldsmiths—
had developed an artistic language that was “supple” and
“expansive” and could “simulate a foreign idiom by its own
means.”32 This point bears repeating, for, as noted above, even
the pigments used to create the document’s purple ground—
madder and minium—were intended to simulate murex purple
dye from Byzantium.
Von Euw’s extensive iconographic analysis of the marriage
charter intrepidly seeks to isolate the clearest iconographic
sources for its silken forms; his examination attends to the
Figure 6. Pericope Book of Henry II, front cover, 1012. Ivory, gold, cloisonné, gems. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, CLM 4452.

WORD & IMAGE 219

document’s imagery in isolation from its text and from the
historical events that occasioned its creation.33 He suggests
that the range of models for this extraordinary object were
vast and can be located in forms derived from Assyrian textiles
and sculpture, Lombard goldsmithwork, sixth-century consular
diptychs from Constantinople, and ivories carved at the court
school of Charlemagne, to name but a few. Von Euw’s study
concludes that these varied iconographic sources have at their
heart the glorification of the ruler; he suggests only obliquely
that, by 972, the charter’s various forms all carried with them
the sheen of the “ancient,” the “Carolingian,” and the
“Byzantine.”34 I would further propose that the work’s creators
were also looking closely to Roman sculptural traditions in
which scenes of dominant beasts (especially lions) tearing at
the flesh of a captive bull or horse abounded (figure 7). Such a
display of taste and sophistication was doubtlessly directed both
to Theophanu and her handlers from the Byzantine imperial
court who must also have been in attendance at the wedding;
the document had to be as sumptuous as it was legally binding,
and what better way to do so than with an air of romanitas.
Studies of the marriage charter’s silken models consistently
note that precious silks from Byzantium and the Near East
were frequently used in sacred contexts, and they were prized
as diplomatic gifts. Often, scraps of silk were used to wrap
relics, for the beauty of the exotic fabric was deemed worthy
to contain and protect saintly remains. During the Carolingian
and Ottonian periods, Byzantine silks were occasionally used as
pastedowns in liturgical books.35 This practice gave rise to the
integration of full-folio painted “swaths” of simulated fabric
into Gospel texts as a way of alluding to the sacred qualities
of the Word, as is the case in the Golden Gospels of
Echternach (figure 8). Christine Sciacca has examined the use
of actual textiles as coverings for illuminations that were sewn
into medieval liturgical and devotional manuscripts, and has
proposed that their integration must have had implications for
Figure 7. Two sides of a Roman sarcophagus with a lion attacking a horse, c.200 CE. Marble. Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican Museums, Rome. Photos:
author; photo montage: Ava Freeman.
220 ELIZA GARRISON
the books’ use.36 In a related study, Anna Bücheler has argued
that the painted textile pages in the twelfth-century Aegidien
Gospels functioned for their viewers as metaphorical “veils” of
revelation.37 Furthermore, in an investigation of the full-folio
textile pages in the Golden Gospels of Echtnernach, Bücheler
has compellingly proposed that the color purple and purple
textiles were metaphorically related both to the human body
and, more specifically, to Christ’s humanity.38 Made as it was
from skin, parchment was already laden with metaphorical
allusions to the physical and the material.
Sciacca, Bücheler, and others have acknowledged that silk
was so rare in the West that even its simulation was equated
with the divine. By the tenth century, Constantinople was the
sole center of the silk industry in the Western world; the city’s
five private guilds answered directly to the city prefect, who
was charged with maintaining a monopoly on silk, for over-
seeing its export, and for ensuring that silks dyed with murex
purple were destined only for the emperor’s use.39 Its extreme
rarity made it that much more desirable. In 968, while on
mission to the Byzantine imperial court to negotiate a marriage
for Otto II at a point when Otto I and Empress Adelheid were
holding out for the purple-born princess Anna as the chosen
bride, the Italian diplomat and cleric Liudprand of Cremona
illicitly obtained a cache of murex purple silks to bring back to
Italy with him. These were promptly confiscated, for possession
of such silks was tantamount to treason and punishable by
death.40
If it is possible to say anything definitive about the silken
forms on the marriage charter of Theophanu, it is that their
varied iconographic pedigree would have been clear to the
people who designed them, and no doubt also to the people
for whom they were made. At once Roman, Byzantine, Near
Eastern, and Carolingian, the forms on the body of the charter
conveyed a sense of preciousness and rarity. They also testified
to a level of cultural sophistication that included a working
Figure 8. Codex Aureus of Echternach, c.1040. Parchment. Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, Hs. 15146, ff. 17v–18r.
familiarity with the aesthetic qualities of all manner of artworks
made in a variety of media, to the extent that Ottonian illumi-
nators were capable of simulating these media in paint. Indeed,
the marriage charter’s dazzling appearance would seem to
suggest that there was no rare and exotic thing of beauty that
could escape the voracious eyes of book painters working for
the Ottonian court. In this instance and many others, Ottonian
rulers and courtiers supported the artistic virtuosity of painters
in their employ to give visual form to their authority. In the
absence of murex purple dye, painters employed at the
Ottonian court set themselves the task of harnessing the mate-
rial qualities of woven and embroidered purple silk. Their
mastery of this simulative process was itself a mark of authority
and control.
The text
The marriage charter’s visual references to and simulation of
other things amplified its textual call to Theophanu and Otto
II to understand themselves as two parts of the same whole; the
purpose of their union was the birth of heirs to the throne. The
marriage charter’s focus on replication, repetition, and
reproduction—down to the pairs of dominant and submissive
animals and beasts on its surface—enhanced its function and it
made the terms of the text that much more binding. The
authors of the charter’s language seem to have used the docu-
ment’s visual emphasis on replication and repetition as a point
of departure in drafting a text that, on the one hand, could
legally mark Theophanu and Otto II’s union and, on the other,
employed terms that place art and marriage in the service of
creation. That is, the people who drafted the text and the
charter’s scribe heeded the work’s visual complexity with lan-
guage that could match it. The virtuosic artfulness of both its
“silken” forms and its text amplified its ideological force.
Generally speaking, the structure of the text of Theophanu’s
marriage charter hews closely to the structure of Frankish dotal
charters.41 Walter Deeters proposed that the courtiers respon-
sible for much of the legal language in Theophanu’s charter
were drawing from language in the dotal charter issued on
December 12, 937, for Empress Adelheid on the occasion of her
betrothal to her first husband, King Lothar of Italy; the authors
of the text of Theophanu’s document may have also had access
to the no-longer-extant copy of the official marriage charter
WORD & IMAGE 221
that was later issued for this union.42 A side-by-side comparison
of the texts of these two documents underscores both the
verbosity and the theological tenor of Theophanu’s charter
relative to its closest extant model. The authors of the charter’s
language were expected to draft a text that contained all the
legal language necessary for such a document, and yet also
underscored the spiritual importance of marriage with termi-
nology borrowed from sources ranging from the Bible to
Augustine and Tertullian.43 In other words, much of the mar-
riage charter’s language goes beyond the boilerplate legalese
that would have sufficed to bind Theophanu and Otto II in
legal matrimony and to outline the lands that the bride
received in her dos. This indicates that the courtiers and clerks
who wrote the charter’s text were charged with the task of
finding language that could suit the enormous political signifi-
cance of the union between the Ottonian and Byzantine imper-
ial houses.44
In a suggestion that has gone unheeded in the subsequent
literature on the marriage charter, Deeters argued that none
other than Willigis, the future archbishop of Mainz, and
Gerbert of Aurillac, the future Pope Sylvester II, were responsible
for drafting much of its text.45 That Willigis was involved in some
aspect of the charter’s text is clear from its final line, which reads:
“I, Willigis the Chancellor, in place of Archchaplain Ruotpert,
have reviewed this” (see the appendix). Indeed, Willigis had
become an adviser to the co-emperor Otto II in 969, and by
December 971 had advanced in the ranks of the imperial
chancellery.46 A mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, theo-
logian, and teacher, Gerbert of Aurillac was among the most
learned men of his time; prior to his employment at the
Ottonian court, he had been educated in Catalonia, where he
studied the liberal arts.47 At the time of Theophanu’s marriage to
Otto II, both Willigis and Gerbert were in Rome, and both were
working at the Ottonian court. Gerbert’s likely involvement in
writing some of the charter’s language also explains its emphasis
on the creator as a craftsman, which further echoes the charter’s
visual focus on doubling and repetition.
The marriage charter’s text consists of nine sections of vary-
ing length, and, as mentioned above, it is written in the voice of
Otto II. Knowing that the document would be read aloud, the
charter’s scribe, presumably in consultation with its authors,
interspersed small gold dots at key points throughout the text to
indicate to the reader where to pause so as to gird its rhetorical
impact and to lend rhythm to the spoken word.48 These gold
dots further indicate that, in the months following the imperial
marriage, the text of the charter would have been read on
repeated occasions as the couple made its way northward and
Theophanu was introduced to her subjects.49 If this is the case,
then the text’s meanings would have been re-inscribed in a
series of ritualized speech acts; its performative repetition fol-
lowing the wedding is in keeping with the generative aspects of
creation proclaimed in the text and evoked in its imagery.50 It
is by no means out of the ordinary that Theophanu is voiceless
222 ELIZA GARRISON
in this document; her role at court was ordered and confirmed
by her husband and father-in-law. The male voice and the
male action that gave voice to the text directed Theophanu to
embody its ideals in her roles as a reflection of her spouse and
as the future mother of heirs to the throne. We might even
think of the text and the images in the charter as performing a
metaphorical “clothing” of Theophanu much in the same way
that the text of the Liuthar Gospels was, according to its
dedication inscription, intended to “clothe” Otto III’s heart.51
As is common for artworks made in all manner of media in
the Ottonian period, the text of the charter seems to unite the
time of the Old and New Testaments with the time of the
Ottonian court. The marriage charter’s opening words, its
Invocatio, call upon the Trinity, and the next line of the
Intitulatio invokes “Otto, august emperor by the favor of divine
clemency” (see the appendix). In the three sections that directly
follow—the Arenga, the Promulgatio and Narratio, and the Dispositio
—the text moves from the time of creation, to the time of the
incarnation, to the time of the charter, in which the Ottonian
court and Ottonian territory are reflections of divine order.
What distinguishes the Arenga of Theophanu’s charter from
its closest model is the explicit focus on creation as generative,
replicative, and artful; this thematic thread is established in the
document’s preamble and it resounds throughout. In the very
first sentence of the Arenga, God is identified both as creator and
a “very good craftsman” (artifex summe bonus), who, “after the
primordial natures had been set forth in perfect elegance at the
beginning of the nascent world,” made Adam “in his own
image and likeness” (ad imaginem et similitudinem suam) and gave
him dominion over all creatures. Eve, here referred to as a
“conjugal helpmeet” (adiutorium coniugale), was built (fabricatus)
from Adam’s rib to function as his consort and to bear his
children in order to repopulate the world to take up the spaces
left by the fallen angels.52 That is, the purpose of marriage
between a man and a woman is for procreation, as opposed to
the satisfaction of more base physical urges. God’s creation of
humankind is likened in this section to Christ’s emergence
“from the immaculate womb of the virgin [. . .]”; the charter’s
text extends this analogy to Christ’s marriage to the Church.53
The preambles of Franco-Saxon marriage charters typically
borrow language from Genesis, and Theophanu’s marriage
charter is no exception. And yet the authors of the marriage
charter integrated theological concepts that were otherwise
uncommon in such texts.54 In a short consideration of the
motif of the Church as the bride of Christ in the final sentences
of the marriage charter’s Arenga, Philip Reynolds has recently
shown that this part of the text had to have been drafted by a
theologian with a deep familiarity with both Paul’s discourse on
marriage in Ephesians 5, and with a gloss on Psalm 18:6 by
Augustine that could have been found in Carolingian
commentaries.55
If the Arenga situates the reader in the time of the Old
Testament, the Promulgatio and Narratio moves forward into the
tenth-century present. As short as it is, relative to the long
Arenga, it is in this section that the legalities of marriage—the
groom’s intention to take his bride in holy matrimony—appear
as a response to God’s command in the long opening segment.
Here the text progresses from an explication of creation and
God’s command to bear children within the bonds of marriage
to Otto II’s own proclamation of his intent to take Theophanu,
“the most noble niece of John, emperor of Constantinople,” in
matrimony and “in the shared fellowship of imperial rule.” In
the logic of the charter’s text, Theophanu’s proper role as Otto
II’s consort is to function as a reflection of him. The completion
of the marriage in Rome, here referred to as Romulea urbs (a
term derived from Ovid),56 burnished the Ottonians’ imperial
pedigree and close connections to the pope; it propagated the
Ottonian court’s romanitas. Perhaps most importantly, this sec-
tion created clear parallels among Otto I, Otto II, and
Theophanu and God the Father, Adam, and Eve.
With these high stakes in mind, the charter’s Dispositio guaran-
tees Theophanu territories as part of her dos as if they were parts of
creation. These counties and provinces were spread across
Ottonian territory; some of them had formerly been in the posses-
sion of Empress Mathilde, Otto I’s mother and Otto II’s paternal
grandmother. As the charter states, Theophanu’s receipt of these
lands was immediate and perpetual, and they were hers to give,
sell, or exchange in any way she pleased. In receiving control over
Istria, Pescara, Walacher, Wichelen (with the abbey of Nivelles
and its fourteen thousand manses), Boppard, Thiel, Herford,
Tilleda, and Nordhausen, the charter proclaims that this control
extends to everything in those places, “along with the castles,
houses, male and female servants [. . .] and everything belonging
wholly to these estates or provinces or abbey.”
Certainly other parts of the charter are redolent of a culture
whose structures were believed to reflect biblical precepts. This
includes a perception of the ruler and the ruling house as
governing with God’s grace, and here we see that it encompasses
a belief that people could be exchanged as one would exchange
castles, livestock, or land. It would be presumptuous to assume
that Theophanu had any chance or inclination to reflect upon
her own dual position in this hierarchy, in which she was both a
ruler and, by virtue of her sex, also an object of exchange, whose
value was connected to her virginity, her fertility, and her exotic
pedigree. Nonetheless, for present-day scholars of this artwork, a
consideration of these dual positions can help us come to a
different understanding of how the marriage charter’s artfulness
and its focus on replication and reproduction functioned to put
Theophanu in her place at the very beginning of her life at court.
Unlike the first five sections of the charter, which are visually
united in a single text, its final four sections are arranged in
short independent paragraphs. The Sanctio assures that anyone
who poses a challenge to Theophanu’s gift will be forced to pay
her a fine of one thousand pounds in “the finest gold.” The
Corroboratio introduces and explains the Subscriptio beneath it,
noting: “That this decree be more truly believed and more
diligently upheld in the times to come, we order that it be
strengthened by our own hand and marked with the imprint
[impressione] of our ring.”
Indeed, the Subscriptio further connects all the governing
ideas of the charter’s text with the concepts of copying and
replication in the work’s silken foundation, and it does so by
exploiting the imagistic potential of the names of Otto the
father and Otto the son (figure 9). Introduced by the term
dominus, the imperial monograms, which function as signa-
tures as well as visual renderings of the imprints of their
imperial rings, are stacked one on top of the other, the son
placed below the father.57 The palindromic qualities of the
name OTTO are used here to representational ends, and
turned inside out and halved to create a curious visual double,
much like the stacked double pairs of animals whose forms are
“woven” into the parchment’s purple ground. The repetition
of the imperial name and the visual reiteration of its symbolic
force make clear that it is a site of replication, representation,
and reproduction. While the text of the charter makes con-
sistent and repeated reference to creation in its many forms,
the placement, organization, and form of the monograms
underscore the sacred nature of the emperor and co-emperor
and their relationship to one another as model and copy,
much as Adam was made after the imago of the creator
himself. If creation constitutes the first mimetic act, the repe-
tition and inversion of the imperial signum makes clear that
both emperors in their sameness will beget more of the same,
and Theophanu’s role was to ensure this. In looking to Adam,
Eve, and the creator as models, Theophanu and Otto II were
enjoined to do their part to help repopulate their own piece of
heaven at court, and in the process heal the deeply wounded
relationship between their empires. The visual and material
terms in which this information is relayed unites the legal and
political aspects of this marriage with the proposed sacredness
of the Ottonian imperial line. Such a broad range of concerns
was best served by representational and textual strategies that
derived many of their meanings from doubling, replication,
and allusions to sealing. Here, Theophanu is metaphorically
aligned with the material upon which Otto II could impress
his own image or signum.
The document’s focus at the beginning and end on the act of
creation—first at the time of Adam and Eve and then at the
time of Otto I and Otto II—as both artful and replicative
registers the simulative qualities of the charter’s ground.
Further, analysis of the text indicates that its authors were
familiar with the discourse on creation contained in
Calcidius’s fourth-century Commentary on and translation of
Plato’s Timaeus.58 In the late tenth century, Gerbert of
Aurillac and his students were particularly active in copying
Calcidius’s Commentary and in translating the Timaeus.59 Indeed,
those who read Plato in the tenth century read him through
Calcidius’s commentary and translation; Calcidius’s texts there-
fore determined the shape of Platonic thought in this period.
WORD & IMAGE 223
Figure 9. Detail of figure 1 showing the Subscriptio of the marriage charter of Empress Theophanu.
Even if Gerbert was not involved in drafting the language of
the charter with Willigis, it is significant that the sections of the
marriage charter’s text that stray most pointedly from the dotal
charter of Adelheid—its closest extant model—are those that
emphasize both creation and God’s role as an artist and crafts-
man. For example, the first sentence of Adelheid’s charter
includes a reference to God as the “creator omnium’, while
the document drafted for Theophanu begins with the phrase
“Creator et institutor omnium ab aeterno Deus quecumque
sunt rerum primordialibus initio nascentis mundi in perfecta
elegantis editis naturis [. . .]” (see the appendix).60 “God, eter-
nal creator and founder of all things whatsoever they are,” who
is described at the end of that same sentence as “a very good
craftsman” (artifex summe), brought all the “primordial natures”
together in harmony and beauty. Much as a craftsman might
mold or shape material, the god of Theophanu’s charter is able
to harness chaotic primordial elements and to bring them into
a perfect order.
Such a characterization of the creator would seem to derive in
great measure from Calcidius’s description of Plato’s creator in
the Timaeus.61 In chapter 23 of his Commentary, which in part
responds to and expands upon section 32c of the Timaeus,
Calcidius states that “everything that exists is a work of god,
nature, or man acting as an artisan [artificis] in imitation of
nature.”62 Even a casual reading of Calcidius’s translation and
commentary makes clear that both Plato and Calcidius were
interested in explaining in various ways the role of a craftsman-
god or demiurge (most commonly an opifex but occasionally also
an artifex) in fashioning things that resemble and reflect divine
models.63 In her examination of Calcidius’s commentary and
224 ELIZA GARRISON
translation of Plato, Anna Somfai has remarked that Calcidius
presents “Creation [. . .] as the placing of a mathematical order by
a divine artifex on previously existing, chaotic matter.”64 For his
part, Ittai Weinryb sees this “chaotic matter,” which Calcidius
called silva, as “pure potentiality.”65 Artists, in the manner of the
creator, could harness and work this potentiality. In the text of the
charter, Theophanu and Otto II were reminded again and again
of their own physical potentiality, whose positive fulfillment
depended on a harmonious and fecund union. Like the pairs of
tussling creatures whose chaotic yet choreographed movements
repeat down the expanse of the charter’s ground, this document
gave Theophanu and Otto II an understanding of the urgency
and inevitability of this responsibility, upon which the continuity
of the Saxon line depended. Although only a speculation, it is
tempting to see the visual and textual tension between order and
chaos in relation to the warfare and political intrigue that marked
the five-year marriage negotiations between the Ottonian and
Byzantine imperial houses. In short, the images, text, and materi-
als of the marriage charter are imbued with a powerful mimetic
charge; the object’s extraordinary sophistication is a testimony to
the high political stakes of Theophanu and Otto II’s union.
The marriage negotiations
In the 960s, both the Roman Emperor Otto I and his Byzantine
counterpart, Emperor Nikephoros Phokas, had set their sights on
establishing territorial control in southern Italy.66 Phokas was
married to Empress Anastasio Theophanu, the wife of his pre-
decessor; the empress played an influential role at the Byzantine
court.67 In March 967, while he was in residence in Ravenna,
Otto I received emissaries from Phokas’s court. The Byzantine
diplomats expressed Phokas’s concern over the incursion of Otto
I’s forces into Benevento and Capua and those towns’ surround-
ing territories; both towns and their dependent lands were situ-
ated on the edge of the Ottonian empire and abutted territory
controlled by the Byzantines. By the close of these talks, an
arranged marriage between the two houses appeared to be the
most reasonable way to a military truce. Otto I entrusted a
Venetian named Dominikus to travel to Constantinople and
appeal to Phokas for a marriage between Phokas’s stepdaughter,
Anna, and Otto II.68 Perhaps as a way of assuring the Byzantines
that any purple-born daughter of theirs would marry within her
station, Otto II was elevated to co-emperorship with his father on
December 25, 967, at St. Peter’s in Rome.
Already by January 968, or shortly thereafter, the marriage
negotiations between the Ottonians and the Byzantines had dete-
riorated, prompting Otto II to send forces to invade the contested
territory of Apulia, which would have extended Ottonian control
over much of the trade on the eastern Italian coast and in the
Adriatic. By March 968, Otto I’s army had advanced as far south
as Bari before his soldiers were forced to retreat.69
This Ottonian defeat at Bari immediately prompted a renewed
set of marriage negotiations; both sides viewed such an exchange
as the best way to achieve a measure of peace between them. This
time, Otto I engaged the polyglot diplomat and cleric Liudprand
of Cremona to renew efforts to arrange a marriage between
Princess Anna and Otto II. By June 4, 968, Liudprand arrived
at the court of Phokas in Constantinople, and the two men met
face to face in the Crown Palace three days later.70 Liudprand
related to Phokas that, in exchange for Anna’s hand in marriage,
Otto I promised to relinquish control over his territories on the
southern Italian peninsula. Phokas rejected this deal out of hand:
in such an exchange, he would settle for nothing less than Rome,
Ravenna, and all their dependent lands. Given the vastly different
expectations on both sides, the negotiations fell apart.71
Just over a year later, late at night on December 10 or early
in the morning of December 11, 969, Phokas was murdered in
his bedchamber by contract killers hired by none other than his
wife, the Empress Anastasio Theophanu, and her lover, a
general named John Tzimiskes who immediately succeeded to
the Byzantine throne.72 This coup-d’état and the concomitant
political changes it brought about at the Byzantine court occa-
sioned the release of the Italian Prince Pandulf of Capua from
prison in Constantinople in the spring of 970. Pandulf was
returned to Italy with a message from the Byzantine court to
Otto I indicating that the new Emperor Tzimiskes was willing
to renew peace and marriage negotiations. Pandulf’s arrival
was particularly timely, since Otto I’s forces had advanced once
more into Apulia.73
In 971, with renewed hope, Otto I sent Archbishop Gero of
Cologne on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople to begin
marriage negotiations yet again; it is possible that Liudprand of
Cremona accompanied his German colleague.74 Unlike his pre-
decessor, the Emperor Tzimiskes was willing to forgo control
over Rome and Ravenna in favor of Apulia and Calabria. In
spite of the new political openness of his court, however,
Tzimiskes, like his predecessor, refused to marry off Anna to
Otto II. As much as the relations between the Ottonians and the
Byzantines had warmed by this point, and in spite of the imperial
titles of Otto the father and Otto the son, marrying off a purple-
born daughter to a European court could pose a potential threat
to the line of Byzantine succession in the future.75
Instead of sending Anna, Tzimiskes selected the young
Theophanu, a niece of his who had probably grown up in the
palace walls but who was not purple-born.76 At some point in
the early months of 972, Theophanu, along with her own retinue
and that of Archbishop Gero, boarded ship and sailed for the
Italian peninsula.77 They disembarked at an Italian port under
Byzantine control—perhaps Bari or Siponto—and proceeded
thence to Benevento, which was then under Ottonian control,
where Bishop Dietrich of Metz formally received them. From
Benevento they made their way to Rome, where Otto I, Otto II,
and the rest of the imperial court met them.78
Thietmar of Merseburg noted in his Chronicon that “not a few”
nobles at Otto I’s court felt that Theophanu’s arrival was an
affront to the Saxon emperor’s honor, and they advised Otto I
to send the girl back to Constantinople.79 Yet there were many
reasons not to return Theophanu to the Byzantine court.80 For
example, it is possible that the subject of a Byzantine princess who
was not born in the purple had been part of the last negotiations.
At the very least, Otto I was certainly aware that returning
Theophanu to her family would only protract and intensify the
long-standing political antagonism between the two houses.
Having faced serious challenges from his younger brother,
Henry, upon his accession of the throne in 936, it is plausible
that Otto I and Empress Adelheid were concerned about their son
fathering a healthy and legitimate male heir.81 With verbal and
visual imagery that invokes procreation and doubling,
Theophanu’s marriage charter would seem to be the one primary
source that might corroborate this proposition. At the very least,
this magnificent document provided Theophanu with the purple
pedigree that Otto I, Adelheid, and much of the rest of the
Ottonian court had so desperately desired.
Conclusions
On the charter, creation generates and demands more of the
same; it is mimetic, and therefore expects an equal, and equally
harmonious, response. The document’s visual and linguistic
emphasis on sameness and doubling imbued it with authority
and a binding power. At this point of closure it is important to
acknowledge that Theophanu adapted quickly to the expecta-
tions enumerated on the charter’s silken surface: she bore five
children (four of whom survived infancy) in quick succession,
including a male heir to the throne; she took an active hand in
the governance of the empire during Otto II’s lifetime and after
his death in 983, and she was, along with the Empress Dowager
Adelheid, a formidable imperial regent for her son, Otto III,
WORD & IMAGE 225
until her own death in 991 in Nimwegen when she was about
thirty-one years old.82 Upon her request, she was buried in the
Westwerk of St Pantaleon in Cologne, in proximity to the relics
of that same saint that Archbishop Gero of Cologne had
procured in Constantinople while he was arranging her
marriage.83 These same relics, then, had accompanied
Theophanu on her entry into life at the Ottonian court, and
they stood sentry for her after her death. No matter how
powerful a figure Theophanu eventually became in her short
life, at the time of its creation, the marriage charter that she
received on her wedding day was one result of a political
exchange in which her future life and property were laid out
for her like so many bones on precious silk.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This article benefited enormously from insight and feedback
from Brigitte Buettner, Mariah Proctor-Tiffany, Nina Rowe,
Stephen Wagner, and Ittai Weinryb. Changes suggested by an
anonymous referee for this journal strengthened the terms of the
argument. William North provided extremely helpful substan-
tive comments on an earlier draft, and he graciously allowed the
publication of his revised translation of the Charter's text with
this article. John Magee and Anna Somfai deserve recognition
for their willingness to field questions as the author grappled
with Calcidius. Philip Reynolds was most gracious in engaging
queries about the theological nuances of the Charter’s text.
Kristen Collins, Sherry Lindquist, Elizabeth L’Estrange,
Melanie Sympson, Trevor Verrot, and Beth Williamson all
provided space to present this work publicly in its various stages,
and for this the author is deeply grateful. Jürgen Diehl and the
archivists at the Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv in Wolfenbüttel
were most generous in granting access to the Marriage Charter.
The author dedicates this article to the memory of the historian
David Warner.
NOTES
1 – Theophanu was born in either 959 or 960 and died in 991. Otto II was
born in 955 and died in 983. While the details of what the marriage liturgy
would have consisted are unclear, the empress’s coronation ceremony
would have resembled the Ordo transcribed in Die Ordines für die Weihe und
Krönung des Kaisers und der Kaiserin, ed. Reinhard Elze (Hannover: Hahnsche
Buchhandlung, 1960), 6–9. See also Cyrille Vogel, “Le Pontifical romano-
germanique du dixième siècle. Nature, date et importance du document,”
Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 6, no. 21 (1963): 27–48; and Cyrille Vogel and
Reinhard Elze, Le Pontifical romano-germanique du dixième siècle (Rome:
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1966).
2 – If such a container existed, then the “fabric” of the charter would have
been conceptually akin to the kinds of precious Byzantine and Near
Eastern fabrics used to wrap relics; the sacred object here would be the
text itself, which had a dual function as a kind of authentic. Given the
preciousness of the document’s content, this container could have been
similarly sumptuous in appearance. For the reference to Byzantine corre-
spondence, see Dieter Matthes and W. Deeters, Die Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin
Theophanu. 972 April 14, Rom. Eine Ausstellung des Niedersächsischen Staatsarchivs in
226 ELIZA GARRISON
Wolfenbüttel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1972), 29, 38; and Die
Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin Theophanu. Sonderveröffentlichung der
Niedersächsischen Archivverwaltung anläßlich des X. internationalen
Archivkongresses in Bonn, ed. and trans. Dieter Matthes (Braunschweig:
Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv, 1984), 24, 26. See also Franz Dölger, Byzanz
und die europäische Staatenwelt. Ausgewählte Vorträge und Aufsätze (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964), 9–33.
3 – The marriage charter is now kept in the Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv,
Wolfenbüttel, 6 Urk 11. In 1823 it was removed from the convent archives
at Gandersheim to be deposited in the Braunschweigisches
Landeshauptarchiv. It is possible that the document arrived in
Gandersheim at some point during Theophanu’s lifetime or during that
of her daughter, Sophia, who was abbess at Gandersheim from 1001 to
1039; see Anthony Cutler and William North, “Word Over Image: On the
Making, Uses, and Destiny of the Marriage Charter of Otto II and
Theophanu,” in Interactions: Artistic Interchange between the Eastern and Western
Worlds in the Medieval Period, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2007), 167–87, at 167, nn. 1, 2. In 1980, the
Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv published a facsimile of the marriage char-
ter along with a short commentary volume: Die Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin
Theophanu. 972 April 14. Faksimile-Ausgabe nach dem Original im Niedersächsischen
Staatsarchiv in Wolfenbüttel (6 Urk 11), ed. and trans. Dieter Matthes (Stuttgart:
Müller & Schindler, 1980).
4 – Precisely how the document would have been displayed and read in
public remains an open question. Was the charter’s golden text and
“silken” surface displayed to the audience while a more ordinary transcrip-
tion and/or translation was read aloud? Was the text read in its entirety or
merely brief passages? Anthony Cutler and William North have offered
some educated speculation; Cutler and North, “Word Over Image,”
170–71, 182–83. See also note 50 below.
5 – Judith Herrin, “Theophano: The Education of a Byzantine Princess,”
in The Empress Theophano, ed. Adelbert Davids (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 64–85, esp. 82.
6 – In recent decades, scholars of contemporary art have turned their
attention to the practice of “re-mediation,” in which artworks made in a
particular medium evoke other, often older, media; e.g. Jay David Bolter
and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1998); and Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural
Memory, ed. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009).
7 – The work of Madeline Caviness, Brigitte Buettner, Cecily Hilsdale, and
Mariah Proctor-Tiffany has attended to the ways in which objects, in
Buettner’s words, “played a role in the production and reproduction of
social relations within court society”, 598; Madeline Caviness, “Patron or
Matron? A Capetian Bride and a Vade Mecum for Her Marriage Bed,”
Speculum 68, no. 2 (1993): 333–62; Brigitte Buettner, “Past Presents: New
Year’s Gifts at Valois Courts, ca. 1400,” Art Bulletin 83, no. 4 (2001):
598–625; Cecily Hilsdale, “Constructing a Byzantine ‘Augusta’: A Greek
Book for a French Bride,” Art Bulletin 87, no. 3 (2005): 458–83; eadem,
Byzantine Art and Diplomacy in an Age of Decline (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2014); Mariah Proctor-Tiffany, “Transported as a Rare
Object of Distinction: The Gift-Giving of Clémence of Hungary, Queen of
France,” Journal of Medieval History (2015): 1–21.
8 – Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,
trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953, 2003),
set up many of the terms of the scholarly discussion of the concept. To get a
sense of the manner in which art historians have engaged with it, and for
references to the rest of the literature, see Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Gunter Gebauer and
Christoph Wulf, Spiel–Ritual–Geste: Mimetisches Handeln in der sozialen Welt
(Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1998); The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation,
ed. Herbert Kessler and Gerhard Wolf (Bologna: Nuova Alfa and Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1998); Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Vibeke Olsen, “The
Significance of Sameness: An Overview of Standardization and Imitation
in Medieval Art,” Visual Resources 20 (2004): 161–78; Original–Kopie–Zitat.
Kunstwerke des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Wolfgang Augustyn and
Ulrich Söding (Passau: Dietrich Klinger, 2010); Similitudo, ed. Martin Gaier,
Jeanette Kohl, and Alberto Saviello (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2012); and
Göran Sörbom, Mimesis and Art: Studies in the Origin and Early Development of an
Aesthetic Vocabulary (Stockholm: Svenska, 1966).
9 – Richard Krautheimer, “Introduction to an ‘Iconography of Mediaeval
Architecture,’” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 1–33.
10 – Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak, “Replica: Images of Identity and the
Identity of Images in Prescholastic France,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and
Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Hamburger and Anne-
Marie Bouché (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 46–64. See
also my analysis of this concept in relation to Otto III’s donations to the
Palace Chapel at Aachen: Eliza Garrison, Ottonian Imperial Art and Portraiture:
The Artistic Patronage of Otto III and Henry II (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 39–86,
esp. 50–60, and eadem, “Otto III at Aachen,” Peregrinations 3, no. 1 (2010):
83–137.
11 – Hartmut Hoffmann devoted an entire section of his Buchkunst und
Königtum to the marriage charter. He identified the charter’s illuminations
as the work of the “Master of the Registrum Gregorii,” who was active in
Trier; Hartmut Hoffmann, Buchkunst und Königtum im ottonischen und
frühsalischen Reich, 2 vols (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1986), Vol. I, 103–26.
For a technical examination of the charter’s golden script, see Vera
Trost, “Chrysographie und Argyrographie in Handschriften und
Urkunden,” in Kaiserin Theophanu: Begegnung des Ostens und Westens um die
Wende des ersten Jahrtausends, ed. Peter Schreiner and Anton von Euw, 2
vols (Cologne: Schnütgen Museum, 1991), Vol. II, 335–43.
12 – Hoffmann, Buchkunst und Königtum, I: 10–11; Hans Schulze, Die
Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin Theophanu. Die Griechische Kaiserin und das römisch-
deutsche Reich, 972–991 (Hannover: Hahn, 2007), 27–28.
13 – Such imperial offspring were described as “purple born” or “born in
the purple” (Greek Πορφυρογέννητος and latinized in the West to porphyr-
ogenitus). These terms could only refer to children of the Byzantine emperor
who were born in this special birthing chamber in the imperial palace in
Constantinople, and the title could only apply to imperial children born to
the emperor after he had become emperor. For more on this, see Adelbert
Davids, “Marriage Negotiations between Byzantium and the West and the
Name of Theophano in Byzantium (Eighth to Tenth Centuries),” in
Davids, Empress Theophano, 99–120, at 99–101.
14 – Cutler and North were the first to propose such a scenario; Cutler and
North, “Word Over Image,” at 180.
15 – The literature on medieval marriage and medieval brides is vast, and
thus I cite the most critical points of departure, each of which contains
references to a host of other sources. On medieval brides and marriage, see
Georges Duby, The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern
Marriage in Medieval France, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Pantheon,
1983); idem, Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages, trans. Jane Dunnett
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Judith Herrin,
“Theophano: The Education of a Byzantine Princess,” in Davids, Empress
Theophano, 64–85; Jo Ann McNamara, “Women and Power through the
Family Revisited,” in Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the
Middle Ages, ed. Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2003), 17–30, esp. 25–26; Carolyn L. Connor, Women of
Byzantium (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 207–37;
and Sara McDougall, “The Making of Marriage in Medieval France,”
Journal of Family History 38, no. 2 (2013): 103–21. On marriage as a sacra-
ment, see Philip L. Reynolds, How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments: The
Sacramental Theology of Marriage from its Medieval Origins to the Council of Trent
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); To Have and to Hold:
Marrying and its Documentation in Western Christendom, 400–1600, ed. Philip L.
Reynolds and John Witte, Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007); and Philip L. Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church: The
Christianization of Marriage During the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods
(Leiden: Brill, 1994).
16 – Specialists seem relatively certain that the artist who painted the
charter’s ground was none other than the “Master of the Registrum
Gregorii”; see notes 11 and 12 above.
17 – For a brief examination of this connection along with references to the
earlier literature, see Wolfgang Georgi, “Ottonianum und
Heiratsurkunde,” in Schreiner and von Euw, Kaiserin Theophanu: Begegnung
des Ostens und Westens, II: 13–160, at 135–143.
18 – Ibid., 143–46.
19 – For the most recent work on these objects, see Nino Zchomelidse, Art,
Ritual, and Civic Identity in Medieval Southern Italy (University Park: Penn State
University Press, 2014), 34–71.
20 – Ibid., 55–56. Zchomelidse has tied the emergence of these scrolls (also
called Exultet rolls) to both the patronage of Archbishop Landulf of
Benevento and the Beneventan Easter Rite. It seems significant that the
form and elements of the imagery of both southern Italian liturgical scrolls
and the marriage charter are so similar, particularly in the light of the fact
that control over Benevento, Capua, and their dependent territories was
one of the many terms of discussion in the negotiations between the
Ottonians and the Byzantines.
21 – Although there is no way to know for certain how tall Theophanu was
at the time of her marriage, it seems possible she was not much taller than
the marriage charter when she first received it.
22 – For pigment analysis, see Hans Goetting and Hermann Kühn, “Die
sogenannte Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin Theophanu (DO II.21), ihre
Untersuchung und Konservierung,” Archivalische Zeitschrift 64 (1968): 11–24.
23 – Whatever the treasure that Theophanu brought with her from
Constantinople may have consisted of is a mystery. Indeed, very few art-
works that can be directly associated with her patronage survive. Hiltrud
Westermann-Angerhausen has addressed the question of whether the
numerous pieces of Byzantine and eastern spolia in Ottonian treasury
works somehow derived from the precious objects that Theophanu must
have brought from Constantinople, suggesting that this question is a bit of a
red herring in art-historical studies of Ottonian artworks. To get a sense of
the discussion of Theophanu’s elusive treasure, see Hiltrud Westermann-
Angerhausen, “Did Theophano Leave Her Mark on the Ottonian
Sumptuary Arts?,” in Davids, Empress Theophano, 244–64; eadem, “Spuren
der Theophanu in der ottonischen Schatzkunst?,” in Schreiner and von
Euw, Kaiserin Theophanu: Begegnung des Ostens und Westens, II: 193–218; Hans
Wentzel, “Das byzantinische Erbe der ottonischen Kaiser. Hypothesen
über den Brautschatz der Theophanu,” Aachener Kunstblätter 40 (1970):
15–39; idem, “Das byzantinische Erbe der ottonischen Kaiser.
Hypothesen über den Brautschatz der Theophanu,” Aachener Kunstblätter
43 (1972): 11–96; idem, “Alte und altertümliche Kunstwerke der Kaiserin
Theophanu,” Pantheon 30 (1972): 3–18; and idem, “Byzantinische
Kleinkunstwerke aus dem Umkreis der Kaiserin Theophanu,” Aachener
Kunstblätter 44 (1973): 43–86.
24 – It is tempting to see these paired animals as references both to tensions
between the east and the west and the eventual consummation of
Theophanu and Otto II’s marriage. Mary Carruthers has an excellent,
yet short, analysis on a passage in Deuteronomy 21 describing a captor and
a captive that would seem also to apply to the concepts evoked in the
paired images on the marriage charter; Mary Carruthers, The Craft of
Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 126–27. See also Cutler and North,
“Word Over Image,” esp. 176–79.
25 – Anna Muthesius, Studies in Byzantine, Islamic, and Near Eastern Silk
Weaving (London: Pindar, 2008), 17–21. See the following studies for more
on the significance of Byzantine silks in the Ottonian empire: Anna
Muthesius, “The Role of Byzantine Silks in the Ottonian Empire,” in
Byzanz und das Abendland im 10. und 11. Jahrhundert, ed. Evangelos
Konstantinou (Cologne: Böhlau, 1997), 301–17; eadem, Byzantine Silk
Weaving, AD 400 to AD 1200 (Vienna: Fassbaender, 1997), esp. 119–39;
eadem, Studies in Silk in Byzantium (London: Pindar, 2004); and Leonie von
Wilckens, “Byzantinische Seidenweberei in der Zeit vom späten 8. bis zum
WORD & IMAGE 227
12. Jahrhundert,” in Kunst im Zeitalter der Kaiserin Theophanu, ed. Anton von
Euw and Peter Schreiner (Cologne: Locher, 1993), 79–93. Warren
Woodfin’s work has dealt with the political meanings of Byzantine silks in
the west; Warren Woodfin, “Presents Given and Presence Subverted: The
Cunegunda Chormantel in Bamberg and the Ideology of Byzantine Textiles,”
Gesta 47, no. 1 (2008): 33–50; and Clothing the Sacred: Medieval Textiles as Fabric,
Form, and Metaphor, ed. Warren Woodfin and Mateusz Kapustka (Berlin:
Imorde, 2014).
26 – Dieter Matthes identified this figure as John the Evangelist in his
commentary volume to the facsimile of the marriage charter, but he did
not provide any explanation for this identification. Both this figure and that
of Mary are placed in front of blue backgrounds, forming bookends to
Christ’s figure in the manner of a traditional Deesis. John’s figure holds a
codex in his left hand, which would be an appropriate attribute for the
Evangelist. This is, therefore, among the earliest—if not, in fact, the earliest
—extant representations of a Deesis with John the Evangelist instead of John
the Baptist; Dieter Matthes, Die Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin Theophanu.
Faksimile-Ausgabe, 9. Jeffrey Hamburger has argued for the Evangelist’s
role as an imago Dei. Given the charter’s focus on processes of copying,
repetition, and mimesis, the inclusion of the Evangelist in this small vision
of the Deesis is particularly fitting; Jeffrey Hamburger, Saint John the Divine:
The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002).
27 – Anton von Euw, “Ikonologie der Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin
Theophanu,” in Schreiner and von Euw, Kaiserin Theophanu: Begegnung des
Ostens und Westens, II: 175–91, at 186–90, fig. 17.
28 – On the Laudes regiae, see, Ernst Kantorowicz, “Ivories and Litanies,”
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 56–81; idem, Laudes Regiae:
A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1958), esp. 65–111; Schulze, Heiratsurkunde der
Kaiserin Theophanu, 27. Schulze notes here that Deesis iconography had a
protective function both for the recipient of the work and also for its creators.
29 – Zchomelidse, Art, Ritual, and Civic Identity, 34–71.
30 – The literature on this object is extensive, and I cite here the most
substantive analyses, each of which contains references to the rest of the
literature: Cutler and North, “Word Over Image”; Schulze, Heiratsurkunde
der Kaiserin Theophanu; von Euw, “Ikonologie der Heiratsurkunde der
Kaiserin Theophanu,”; Matthes and Deeters, Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin
Theophanu.
31 – Cutler and North, “Word Over Image,” 180.
32 – Westermann-Angerhausen, “Did Theophano Leave Her Mark,” 252,
and generally 246–52. See also note 23 above.
33 – Von Euw, “Ikonologie der Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin Theophanu.”
34 – Ibid., 191.
35 – The Lindau Gospels in the Morgan Library, MS M. 1, contain one
such Byzantine silk pastedown, which was made between the eighth and
tenth centuries.
36 – Christine Sciacca, “Raising the Curtain on the Use of Textiles in
Manuscripts,” in Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing: Textiles and their Metaphors in the
Late Middle Ages, ed. Kathryn Rudy and Barbara Baert (Turnhout: Brepols,
2007), 161–90.
37 – Anna Bücheler, “Veil and Shroud: Eastern References and Allegoric
Functions in the Textile Imagery of a Twelfth-Century Gospel book from
Braunschweig,” Medieval History Journal 15, no. 2 (2012): 269–97. For clear
explanations of the use of silk in Ottonian and Salian manuscripts, see
Stephen Wagner, “Establishing a Connection to Illuminated Manuscripts
Made at Echternach in the Eighth and Eleventh Centuries and Issues of
Patronage, Monastic Reform and Splendor,” Peregrinations 3, no. 1 (2010):
49–82.
38 – Anna Bücheler, “Textile Ornament and Scripture Embodied in the
Echternach Gospel Books,” in Woodfin and Kapustka, Clothing the Sacred,
147–72, at 158–60. David Ganz’s article in this same collected volume
presents parallel arguments on the metaphorical meanings of medieval
228 ELIZA GARRISON
book covers; David Ganz, “Das Kleid der Bücher,” in Woodfin and
Kapustka, Clothing the Sacred, 121–46.
39 – Silk production first arrived in the West in the second half of the
twelfth century during the reign of Roger II of Sicily, who established silk
workshops in Palermo staffed by craftspeople from Byzantium and the
Islamic world; Anna Muthesius, “The Role of Byzantine Silks in the
Ottonian Empire,” in Konstantinou, Byzanz und das Abendland, 302–03.
See also Anna Muthesius, “The Role of Byzantine Silks in the Ottonian
Empire,” in Anna Muthesius, Studies in Byzantine and Islamic Silk Weaving
(London: Pindar, 1995), 201–15, at 202.
40 – Anna Muthesius, “Silken Diplomacy,” in eadem, Studies in Byzantine and
Islamic Silk Weaving, 165–72, at 169, nn. 22, 23. Muthesius notes that purple
silk was so highly sought after that Byzantine emperors supported the
production of silks colored with a lower-quality purple dye for export to
the West; Liudprand of Cremona, Embassy, ch. 54, in The Complete Works of
Liudprand of Cremona, ed. and trans. Paolo Squatriti (Washington, DC:
Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 271–72. See also Peter
Schreiner, “Diplomatische Geschenke zwischen Byzanz und dem Westen
ca. 800–1200: Eine Analyse der Texte mit Quellenanhang,” Dumbarton Oaks
Papers, 58 (2004): 251–82, at 263, n. 87.
41 – Philip Reynolds has outlined in his work the structures of such
documents; Reynolds, How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments, 18–19,
passim; and idem, “Marrying and its Documentation in Pre-Modern
Europe: Consent, Celebration, and Property,” in Reynolds and Witte, To
Have and To Hold, 1–42.
42 – Walter Deeters, “Zur Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin Theophanu,” in
Neue Forschungen zur Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin Theophanu. 972 April 14, Rom
(MGH DO II 21), Sonderdruck aus Braunschweigisches Jahrbuch, 54 (1973):
5–19, at 6–9. Adelheid and Lothar were not married until 942. Lothar
died in November 950 and Adelheid married Otto I in the fall of the
following year. The charter that Adelheid received at her second marriage
has not survived, but it seems likely that it could have served as a crucial
model for the creators of Theophanu’s charter; Schulze, Heiratsurkunde der
Kaiserin Theophanu, 34. Deeters, “Zur Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin
Theophanu,” 7–9, has reproduced the text of Adelheid’s dotal charter; it
is also available in Historiae Patriae Monumenta, Tomus XIII: Codex Diplomaticus
Langobardiae (Turin, 1873), no. 553, pp. 568–69.
43 – Deeters, “Zur Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin Theophanu,” 10–15.
44 – Ibid., 18–19. Deeters noted the care that the text’s authors took in
drafting the text of the marriage charter, and suggested briefly a self-
conscious connection between word and image.
45 – Ibid.
46 – Ibid., 19.
47 – Deeters suggests that this may explain the mozarabic origins of the
liturgical language in the Arenga’s second sentence; ibid., 11.
48 – Ibid., 5–6, nn. 3, 4.
49 – Ibid., 5–6.
50 – Schulze also postulates that Greek and German translations of the
document may have existed; these texts would have likewise been read
aloud in public fora. As he points out, Theophanu’s retinue would have
spoken primarily Greek, and the nobles at the Ottonian court spoke
German; Schulze, Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin Theophanu, 39. This phenom-
enon is also visible in the dedication images of manuscripts made for both
Otto III and Henry II. Compare, for example, the dedication series in the
Liuthar Gospels and the Regensburg Sacramentary, both of which include
coronations surrounded by text that, it stands to reason, was designed to be
read aloud and thus performed on repeated occasions. I would also suggest
that works created in association with Archbishop Egbert of Trier are often
possessed of a “speaking” element, which would have been activated in
their use in liturgical performance; Eliza Garrison, “Movement and Time
in the Egbert Psalter,” in Les Représentations du livre aux époques carolingienne et
ottonienne, ed. Charlotte Denoël, Anne-Orange Poilpré, and Sumi
Shimahara (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming).
51 – Garrison, Ottonian Imperial Art and Portraiture, 39–86; eadem, “Otto III at
Aachen.”
52 – I thank Bill North and Philip Reynolds for assistance with these points.
53 – In addition to the translation given in the appendix, see Reynolds’s
brief treatment of the marriage charter’s text; Reynolds, How Marriage
Became One of the Sacraments, 18–19.
54 – Walter Deeters noted, for example, that the authors of this section of
the text were taking language from Augustine, noting here that the phrase
“Ut ostenderet bonas et sanctas esse nuptias legitima institutione celebratas
seque auctorem esse earum” derives from language in Augustine’s de bono
coniugali I as well as his de nuptiis et concupiscentia II; Deeters, “Zur
Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin Theophanu,” 12, nn. 24–29.
55 – Reynolds, How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments, 19.
56 – Deeters, “Zur Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin Theophanu,” 13 n. 35.
57 – The connections between seals, sealing, and the Ottonian imperial
image are rich and important; Garrison, Ottonian Imperial Art and Portraiture,
39–86; eadem, “Otto III at Aachen.” For a more general treatment of this
phenomenon in the Middle Ages with references to the rest of the litera-
ture, see Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak, “Replica: Images of Identity.”
58 – Calcidius, On Plato’s Timaeus, ed. and trans. John Magee (Harvard:
Harvard University Press, 2016). For an examination of medieval Platonism
and its transmission, see Peter Dronke, The Spell of Calcidius: Platonic Concepts
and Images in the Medieval West (Florence: SISMEL/del Galluzzo, 2008).
59 – Anna Somfai, “The Eleventh-Century Shift in the Reception of Plato’s
‘Timaeus’ and Calcidius’s ‘Commentary,’” Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 65 (2002): 1–21, at 18–19; Ittai Weinryb, “Living Matter:
Materiality, Maker, and Ornament in the Middle Ages,” Gesta 52, no. 2
(2013): 113–32, at 118. See also J. C. M. van Winden, O.F.M., Calcidius on
Matter: His Doctrine and his Sources. A Chapter in the History of Platonism (Leiden:
E. J. Brill, 1959).
60 – For a side-by-side transliteration of both charters, see Deeters, “Zur
Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin Theophanu,” 7–9. The lines of text cited here
appear on p. 7.
61 – For example, Anna Somfai, “The Brussels Gloss: A Tenth-Century
Reading of the Geometrical and Arithmetrical Passages of Calcidius’s
Commentary (ca. 400 AD) to Plato’s Timaeus,” in Scientia in margine: Études sur
les marginalia dans les manuscrits scientifiques du moyen âge à la renaissance, ed.
Danielle Jacquart and Charles Burnett (Geneva: Droz, 2005), 139–69, esp.
141. See also Somfai’s numerous other publications on Calcidius:
“Eleventh-Century Shift in the Reception”; “The Nature of Daemons: A
Theological Application of the Concept of Geometrical Proportion in
Calcidius’ Commentary to Plato’s Timaeus (40D–41A),” in Ancient Approaches
to Plato’s Timaeus, ed. Robert Sharples and Anne Sheppard (London:
Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of
London, 2003), 129–42; and “Calcidius’ Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus and
its Place in the Commentary Tradition: The Concept of Analogia in Text
and Diagrams,” in Philosophy, Science and Exegesis in Greek, Arabic and Latin
Commentaries, Vol. I, ed. Peter Adamson, Han Baltussen, and M. W. F.
Stone, 2 vols. (London: Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced
Study, University of London, 2004), 203–20.
62 – Calcidius/Magee, On Plato’s Timaeus, 23, on pp. 154–55.
63 – Ibid., 28a–c, on pp. 40–43; 29a on p. 43; 26–28 on pp. 158–65; 39 on
pp. 182–83; 119 on pp. 318–19. See also John Magee’s note on 28a, on pp.
717, 718.
64 – Somfai, “Brussels Gloss,” 141; eadem, “Eleventh-Century Shift in the
Reception,” 3–4.
65 – Weinryb, “Living Matter,” 127.
66 – Wolfgang Georgi’s account of the protracted marriage negotiations
between the two houses is clear and detailed, and much of what follows is
taken from his narrative; Wolfgang Georgi, “Ottonianum und
Heiratsurkunde 962/972,” in Schreiner and von Euw, Kaiserin Theophanu:
Begegnung des Ostens und Westens, II, 135–160, esp. 135–143. What is implicit in
Georgi’s account is that both Otto I and Nikephoros Phokas were styling
their eventual political legacies on the models of illustrious emperors. For
Otto I, the most immediate model would have been Charlemagne, and for
Nikephoros Phokas it was none other than Justinian. See also Schulze,
Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin Theophanu, 14.
67 – It is possible that the future Ottonian Empress Theophanu was named
after Anastasio Theophanu. For an assessment of Theophanu’s ancestry and
her biography, see Gunther Wolf, “Wer war Theophanu?,” in Schreiner and
von Euw, Kaiserin Theophanu: Begegnung des Ostens und Westens, II, 385–96; and
Otto Kresten, “Byzantinische Epilegomena zur Frage: Wer war
Theophanu?,” in Schreiner and von Euw, Kaiserin Theophanu: Begegnung des
Ostens und Westens, II, 403–10. Both articles contain numerous references to
the earlier literature on this question. It is not surprising that the question of
Theophanu’s parentage was of particular interest to scholars working in
Germany and Austria during the National Socialist period. Mathilde
Uhlirz’s oft-cited article “Studien zu Theophanu” notes in its very first sen-
tence that the question of Theophanu’s ancestry is important for “rassenbio-
logische” questions; Mathilde Uhlirz, “Studien zu Theophanu,” Deutsches
Archiv für die Erforschung des Mittelalters 6 (1943): 442–74, at 442.
68 – Princess Anna was daughter of Emperor Romanos II and his second
wife, Anastasio Theophanu. She was born in 963, which means she was
between three and four years old at the time of these first set of talks.
69 – Georgi, “Ottonianum und Heiratsurkunde,” 151.
70 – Liudprand of Cremona, Embassy, chs. 2–3, in Squatriti, Complete Works of
Liudprand of Cremona, 239–40. For more on Liudprand’s trip, see Henry Mayr-
Harting, “Liudprand of Cremona’s Account of His Legation to
Constantinople (968) and Ottonian Imperial Strategy,” English Historical
Review 116, no. 467 (2001): 539–56; and Jon N. Sutherland, “The Mission to
Constantinople in 968 and Liudprand of Cremona,” Traditio 31 (1975): 55–81.
71 – Liudprand of Cremona, Embassy, ch. 15 in Squatriti, Complete Works of
Liudprand of Cremona, 248.
72 – Widukind of Corvey, res gestae Saxonicae, III, 73, in Quellen zur Geschichte
der sächsischen Kaiserzeit, ed. and trans. Paul Hirsch, Max Büdinger, and
Wilhelm Wattenbach (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
2002), 177–78; Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, II, 15, in Ottonian
Germany: The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg, ed. and trans. David
Warner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 102–3.
73 – Schulze, Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin Theophanu, 17. Otto I’s forces
retreated from both Apulia and Calabria, which remained territories of
the Byzantines. As a reward for his service, Pandulf received the princi-
palities of Capua and Benevento, but he remained a vassal of Otto I and
Otto II.
74 – Georgi, “Ottonianum und Heiratsurkunde,” 153, n. 77. Georgi sus-
pects that Liudprand died on this mission, citing the fact that his successor
was already in place in 973. Schulze has also proposed that Liudprand
accompanied Archbishop Gero to Constantinople; Schulze, Heiratsurkunde
der Kaiserin Theophanu, 18.
75 – Wolfgang Georgi, “Ottonianum und Heiratsurkunde,” 153. See also
Schulze, Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin Theophanu, 18. Karl Leyser presents an
elegant and clear analysis of the two empires in Karl Leyser, “Theophanu
divina gratia imperatrix augusta: Western and Eastern Emperorship in the
Later Tenth Century,” in Davids, Empress Theophano, 1–27. See also
Adelbert Davids, “Marriage Negotiations between Byzantium and the
West,” in Davids, Empress Theophano, 101–04. Davids examines here
restrictive marriage policies between the Byzantine imperial court and
northern “barbarians,” which the emperor Constantine VII enumerated
in his De administrando imperio. For Constantine VII’s full text, see
Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos, De administrando imperio, ed. Gyula
Moravcsik, trans. R. J. M. Jenkins, revd ed. (Washington, DC:
Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, 1985).
76 – Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, II, 15, in Warner, Ottonian Germany,
102–03.
77 – Schulze, Heiratsurkunde der Kaiserin Theophanu, 20.
78 – Ewald Kislinger, “Reisen und Verkehrswege zwischen Byzanz und
dem Abendland vom neunten bis in die Mitte des elften Jahrhunderts,” in
Konstantinou, Byzanz und das Abendland, 231–57.
WORD & IMAGE 229
79 – Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, II, 15, in Warner, Ottonian Germany,
102–03.
80 – For some speculation on these reasons, see Schulze, Heiratsurkunde der
Kaiserin Theophanu, 19.
81 – For a brief explanation of these events and references to the broader
literature, see Garrison, Ottonian Imperial Art and Portraiture, 4–5.
82 – Theophanu and Otto II’s five children were all born within a span of
five years, when the empress was between the ages of roughly fifteen and
twenty: Sophia, future abbess of Gandersheim and Essen, 975–1039;
Adelheid, future abbess of Quedlinburg, 977–1044; Mathilde, future
Duchess of Lotharingia and wife of Duke Ehrenfried (Ezzo) of
Lotharingia, 979–1025; Otto, future Emperor Otto III, 980–1002; and
twin sister of Otto, name unknown, who died shortly after her birth in 980.
83 – For an examination of the various locations of Theophanu’s grave at St
Pantaleon, see Helmut Fußbroich, “Metamorphosen eines Grabes.
230 ELIZA GARRISON
Grabstätten der Theophanu in der ehemaligen Benediktinerabtei Sankt
Pantaleon,” in Schreiner and von Euw, Kaiserin Theophanu: Begegnung des Ostens
und Westens, II, 231–41.
Appendix: Marriage charter of Theophanu,
Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv, Wolfenbüttel 6
Urk. 11; trans. William L. North (used with the
translator’s permission)
The slash marks in the Latin transcription indicate the place-
ment of gold dots in the original. The author has added periods
merely to indicate where sentences end; these are not present
in the original text.
 Invocatio
In nomine sancte et individue Trinitatis.
Intitulatio
Otto divina favente clementia imperator augustus. /
Arenga
Creator et institutor omnium ab aeterno Deus quecumque sunt rerum /primordialibus initio
nascentis mundi in perfecta elegantia editis naturis /hominem simul qui cunctis a se creatis
preesset et dominaretur /ad imaginem et similitudinem suam artifex summe bonus concedere
voluit. /Quem solum manere cum nollet /ut in multiplicem propaginam perpetuo duratura
posteritas /ordini angelico ob superbiam imminuto reparando sufficeret /adiutorium coniugale
eidem homini costa corpori eius detracta /fabricatus est/duosque in carne una deinceps esse
mirabili providentia ordinavit /lege sanctissima patrem et matrem relinquendos et adherendum
uxori sue decernens. /Ad hoc ipse utriusque testamenti institutor /mediator Dei et hominum
dominus Iesus Christus in humana carne adveniens ipse ex immaculato virginis utero tamquam
sponsus egressus de thalamo ad coniungendam sibi sponsam aeclesiam /ut ostenderet bonas et
sanctas esse nuptias legitima institutione celebratas /seque auctorem esse earum /ad eas venire
/et primo maiestatis sue miraculo eas letificare dum aquam vertit in vinum /voluit et
sanctificare. /Edicto denique proprio a Deo factas esse nuptias ostendens /in evangelio dicit
/quod Deus coniunxit /homo non separet /Apostolica item sententia /honorabile conubium et
thorus immaculatus. /Pluribus quoque sanctorum librorum firmatur testimoniis ut nuptialis
foederis conexio Deo auctore fieri debeat /et ad procreandam subolem mutua et indissolubili
dilectione persistat. /
Promulgatio and Narratio
Unde et ego OTTO superno numine imperator augustus /Domino gratissima sua mihi suffragante
clementia /consultu magni et sanctissimi ac serenissimi genitoris nostri OTTONIS piissimi
imperatoris augusti /Deique et sancte aecclesie /imperii quoque nostri fidelium
/THEOPHANU IOHANNIS Constantinopalitani imperatoris neptim clarissimam in maxima
Romulea urbe /sancto summoque aecclesiarum principe beato Petro apostolo votis nostris
favente /domnique IOHANNIS sanctissimi et universalis papae tertiidecimi benedictione
prosequente /in copulam legitimi matrimonii consortiumque imperii despondere /ac fausto et
felici auspicio Christo propitiante coniugem decrevi assumere./
Dispositio
Noverit igitur omnium sancte Dei ecclesie /nostrorumque fidelium prensentium ac futurorum
industria /qualiter eidem dilectissime sponse nostre dote legitima /more maiorum nostorum
quedam tam infra Italicos fines quam et in transalpinis regnis nostris habenda et iure perpetuo
concedimus possidenda /Histriam Italie provinciam cum comitatu Piscaria /trans Alpes
/provincias Uualacra Uuigle /cum abbatia Nivelle quattuordecim milibus eo pertinentibus
mansis
WORD & IMAGE
231
Invocatio
IN THE NAME OF THE HOLY AND UNDIVIDED TRINITY.
Intitulatio
OTTO, AUGUST EMPEROR BY THE
FAVOR OF DIVINE CLEMENCY.
Arenga
After the primordial natures were brought forth in perfect elegance at the beginning of the nascent
world, God, eternal creator and founder of all things whatsoever they are, wished, as a very good
craftsman, to grant Man who would rule and hold dominion over all that He had created in His
own image and likeness. Because He did not wish man to remain alone so that his posterity,
enduring forever in his manifold progeny, might be suffice to restore the order of angels that had
been diminished on account of pride, God fashioned for this man the aid of a wife from a rib
taken from his body and ordained in His wondrous providence that the two would be from that
moment on in one flesh, decreeing with His most sacred law that the father and mother should
be left behind and the man should cling to his wife. And to show that a marriage celebrated upon
a legitimate foundation was good and holy and that He was its author, the lord Jesus Christ—the
founder of both Testaments, the mediator between God and human beings, the very One Who
came to earth in human flesh and emerged from the immaculate womb of the virgin like a
bridegroom from the marriage bed to join to Himself His bride the Church—wished to attend a
marriage and to gladden it and make it holy with the first miracle of His majesty, when he turned
water into wine. Then, showing by His own decree that marriage was made by God, He says in
the Gospel: “What God has joined, let no man put asunder.” Likewise the Apostle judges:
“Honorable is marriage and spotless the marriage bed.” And many other witnesses from the holy
books affirm that the bond of the marriage pact should happen with God as its author and
endure in mutual and indissoluble love for the procreation of children.
Promulgatio and Narratio
Therefore, upon the consideration of our great and most holy and serene father OTTO [I], the
most pious august emperor, and the faithful of God, the holy church, and our imperial rule, I,
OTTO [II], august emperor by the supernal spirit and with his most gracious mercy favoring me
as lord, have decided to betrothe and take THEOPHANU, the most noble niece of JOHN,
emperor of Constantinople, as my wife in the bond of legitimate matrimony and in the shared
fellowship of imperial rule and to take her as wife in this greatest city of Romulus. For the blessed
Apostle Peter, holy and highest prince of the churches, looks with favor upon our wishes; the
blessing of the most holy and universal pope Lord JOHN XIII attends thereupon, and Christ
shows his favor in tidings of happiness and good fortune.
Dispositio
Let the industry of all the faithful followers, present and future, of the holy Church of God know
that we, following the custom of our ancestors, grant to this, our most beloved bride, a legitimate
dower gift of certain things both within the confines of Italy and in our kingdoms across the Alps
to hold and possess by perpetual right: Istria, the province of Italy, along with the county of
Pescara, and the transalpine provinces of Walacher, Wichelen with the abbey of Nivelles with the
fourteen
(continued )
 (Continued).
232
Invocatio
/imperatorias quoque curtes nostras propria maiestate dignas /Bochharda /Thiela /Heriuurde
/Dullede /Nordhuse /eo quod avie nostre domne Mahthildis /semper semperque auguste
/quoad sibi divinitus vixisse dabatur /fuisse dinoscitur. /Ea per hanc nostri precepti paginam
/eidem sanctissime et dilectissime THEOPHANU sponse nostre concedimus /donamus
/penitusque largimur /et de nostro iure et dominio /in eius dominium iusque transfundimus et
ELIZA GARRISON
delegamus /una cum castellis /casis /servis et ancillis /terris /campis /vineis /pratis /silvis
/montuosa planiemque tenentibus /aquis /aquarumque decursibus /molendinis /piscationibus
/omnibusque rebus ad easdem curtes sive provincias /vel abbatiam in integrum pertinentibus
/quatinus iure proprietatis ea omnia habeat /teneat /firmiterque possideat /sitque sibi potestas
donandi /vendendi /commutandi /vel quicquid exinde iuste decreverit faciendi omnium
hominum contradictione remota. /
Sanctio
Quod si quis hoc nostre dotis preceptum infringere temptaverit /obnoxium se nostre noverit
maiestati compositurus insuper eidem sponse nostre dilectissime THEOPHANU /nostrisque
heredibus auri optimi libras mille. /
Corroboratio
Quod ut verius credatur /diligentiusque in tempora futura servetur /manu propria roborari et
anuli nostri impressione subter iussimus insigniri.
Subscriptio
SIGNUM INVICTISSIMORUM DOMNI [SIGN FOR OTTO I] MAGNI ET PACIFICI ITEM
SIGNUM SIGNUM [SIGN FOR OTTO
II] PERENNITER AUGUSTORUM.
Uuilliisus cancellarius ad vicem Ruotperti archicapellani recognovi.
Dating Clause & Apprecatio
Datum XVII. Kalendas maii /anno dominice incarnationis DCCCCLXXII /indictione XV
/imperii sanctissimi genitoris nostri Ottonis XI /nostri vero V. /Actum rerum ad sanctos
apostolos.
Feliciter /
Invocatio
thousand manses pertaining to it, and those of our imperial estates worthy of her own majesty,
namely Boppard, Thiel, Herford, Tilleda, and Nordhausen, because it is known that they
belonged to our grandmother Lady Mathilda, who is forever and ever Augusta, for as long as it
was divinely given to her to have lived. By this page of our command we concede, give, and
wholly grant these things to this our most holy and beloved bride THEOPHANU and transfer
them from our jurisdiction and lordship into her jurisdiction and lordship, along with the castles,
houses, male and female servants; the lands, vineyards, pastures, and forests, whether they lie in
the mountains or the plain; the waters, waterways, mills, fisheries, and everything belonging
wholly to these estates or provinces or abbey, so that by the law of property she may hold and
possess all of them firmly and may have the power of giving, selling, exchanging, or doing with
them whatever she has justly decided, without the contradiction of any person.
Sanctio
If anyone should attempt to violate this decree of our wedding gift, he should know that he shall
answer to our majesty for punishment, and furthermore shall pay as compensation to our most
beloved bride THEOPHANU and our heirs a sum of one thousand pounds of the finest gold.
Corroboratio
That this decree may be more truly believed and more diligently upheld in the times to come, we
order that it be strengthened by our own hand and marked with the imprint of our ring.
Subscriptio
SIGN OF OTTO THE GREAT AND THE
PEACEABLE
SIGN OF LORD OTTO
EVER AUGUST AND MOST INVINCIBLE
LORDS
I, Willigis the chancellor, in place of
Archchaplain Ruotpert, have reviewed this.
Dating Clause & Apprecatio
Issued on 14 April in the year of the Lord’s incarnation 972, in the fifteenth indiction, the
eleventh year of the imperial rule of our most holy father Otto [I], in the fifth year of ours. This
was done happily in Rome at the Holy Apostles.