The Proserpina Coffin of Emperor Charlemagne in Aachen Cathedral
A Timeline of Recent Events for the Coffin:
1788
For a long time the old coffin has stood empty in the Aachen cathedral, over there on the right up front where our ancestors placed it against the wall. It can be easily seen by all who pass by. And recently there have been more and more complaints about the naked women depicted on the front. These unclothed figures can no longer be accepted in the church. Therefore it is decided to remove the coffin.
1815
The coffin has returned to Aachen from Paris after twenty-one years, where French soldiers had taken it as war booty. But now that it's back, no one really knows what they should do with this somewhat pagan item.
1843
It is decided to remove the coffin from the view of believers and put it on the upper floor behind Charlemagne's throne. But when the workers try to pull it up, the ropes break. The coffin plunges down into the octagon and breaks into eighteen pieces. The visible side survives relatively unscathed.
1998
The coffin of Charlemagne is restored. The five-month long restoration of Charlemagne's two thousand pound sarcophagus is undertaken by the Berlin Museum for Late Antiquity and Byzantine Art and costs 100,000 marks. The coffin is transported to Paderborn where it is one of the most important items displayed in a temporary museum exhibition about the Carolingians.
The Death of the Great Man
The people of western christendom honored Charlemagne as a great man and the fame of the emperor traveled well beyond the borders of the empire. Foreign rulers sent representatives to render him honor. In the year 812 an embassy arrived in Aachen from the Eastern Roman empire and stood in awe of Charlemagne's palace complex. The messengers addressed Charlemagne as "Emperor and Basileus" and thus indicated that they considered this ruler from the north to stand on equal footing with themselves. The Byzantine emperor called Charlemagne his brother. Even the Caliph from distant Baghdad sent ambassadors with gifts as exotic as those in A Thousand and One Nights such as an elephant and trained monkeys.
When Charlemagne finally died in 814, grieving and lamentation was heard throughout Europe. His longtime adviser and friend, Einhard, described the end like this: "just after Charlemagne decided to spend the winter in Aachen, he caught a bad fever and had to lie down... but in addition to the fever soon there were pains in his side,... he died on the seventh day after lying down, after receiving Holy Communion, in the 72nd year of his life and in the 47th after assuming office on January 28th at nine o'clock in the morning. His body was ceremonially washed and cared for and then in great sadness his people brought him into the church and buried him. At first everyone was uncertain, where he should be put, because he had not decided that while living. Finally it occurred to those there, that he could be buried nowhere with more honor than in that cathedral, which he himself and by his own means, had built out of a love of God and our Lord Jesus Christ and in honor of the holy and eternal Virgin, his mother. Therefore Charlemagne was buried in the cathedral on the same day that he died and over his gravestone a golden arch was erected with his picture and an inscription."
The ornate coffin comes down to us from Ancient Rome, or to be more specific, from Imperial Rome during the reigns of Septimius Severus and Caracalla (around 190 to 220 AD). Originally it had a lid, which however has been lost. When Charlemagne died therefore, the coffin was already over six centuries old. The stone comes from Upper Italy, and was quarried at the world-famous marble quarries in Carrara. Simply the technical construction of the coffin is considered to be an amazing feat. It is made from one single block of marble: 87 inches long, 25 inches wide and 23 inches high. The sides are 3 1/2 inches thick and filled with a panorama of ornately carved figures. The Emperor Charlemagne and his court probably saw the coffin when they were in Rome (773 -- 774 AD), and it was probably the Emperor himself who ordered that it be taken back to Aachen with him. After all, in the eighth century, moving a two thousand pound solid block of marble over the Alps was a task that few but the Emperor could organize. There were many scholars in Charlemagne's court who would have been familiar with the story from Greek and Roman mythology depicted on the sides of the coffin.
The wild movement-filled scene carved on to the front of the coffin is the famous kidnapping of a young woman by the god of the underworld - single dramatic moment frozen in time by the marble. The young woman is a goddess. She is named Proserpina (in Greek Persephone) and she is the daughter of Ceres (in Greek Demeter), the goddess of grain and fertility.
