Chasing a fake chronicler: ‘Eutrand’ of Toledo

OK, I’m back! Sorry, there were two conferences and there are still many deadlines, but so many people at Leeds were kind about the blog that I feel under even more compulsion than usual to combat its backlog. I hope to post pretty frequently for the next few months now, as my responsibilities are about to acquire a much more regular shape, which will itself be a post topic shortly. Meanwhile, here’s a post I’ve been wanting to write for a long time. It’s something of a historiographical detective story, and it doesn’t have an ending, because as you will see I had to decide somewhere along the line that it was too much of a sidetrack for me. But it has a clear beginning, and that is with a post of Joan Vilaseca’s in May 2012 at his Cathalaunia blog. For those not up to a bit of Catalan, the post was about the earliest date we could put on the presence the relics Saints Llucia and Martial at Sant Sadurní de Vic, and Joan had just discovered an apparently-unnoticed mention of this in the Chronicon of Liudprand of Cremona.

The frontage, which is all that remains, of Sant Sadurní de Vic, taken from the Carrer de Sant Sadurní by your humble author

You can imagine that this got my attention immediately. There is information about tenth-century Vic in the work of one of the most chatty chroniclers of the early Middle Ages? How had I missed it? So I clicked on the links Joan had helpfully provided and immediately found myself in a world of confusion, which is sadly reflected in the comments I left on that post. For a start, the seventeenth-century edition that Joan was using made the division between its texts very hard to spot.¹ (There is no contents page…) So I looked for the extract in the Chronicon, not realising there were other texts in the volume at all, and found myself in something that seemed pretty clearly to be a truncated version of Liudprand’s Antapadosis, and I’ve got that and this bit isn’t there.² Tracking the reference through the linked edition eventually clarified that the bit that Joan was using came from a text which the editor had called the Fragmenta.³ But there are, canonically, four works attributed to Liudprand: the Antapodosis, a scurrilous and gossipy account of tenth-century Italian and German history as Liudprand had lived through it notionally addressed to Bishop Recemund of Córdoba, whom Liudprand had met at the court of Emperor Otto I of the Germans, Liudprand’s second boss; the Historia Ottonis, a short but detailed account of Otto’s deposition of Pope John XII; the Relatio de Legatione Constantinopolitana, a bitter and vituperative attempt to excuse the failure of an embassy he’d led for Otto to the Emperor Nicephorus Phocas; and a recently-recognised homily on Easter. So what on earth was this?

Title page of the 1635 edition of Liudprand’s spuria that started this trouble, details visible or in notes below

It wants saying at this point that it is really perfectly fair for someone coming new to this stuff to take it for real. Joan had the best reason of all to take them seriously, to wit, that he was following up a citation from a book chapter by Manuel Riu i Riu, whose work was not the sort of place where one usually found forgeries cited.⁴ And after all, it’s just not normal to find a seventeenth-century book of 427 pages in Latin with all the special typefaces and so on and it actually be completely false. The thing looks serious. Even if the suspicion arose, though, you would have a hard time checking it. None of the standard editions or translations of Liudprand I knew so much as mention any dubious or pseudonymous writings, by which I mean the standard (and web-accessible) editions of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Wright’s famous translation or Squatriti’s new one that includes the homily.⁵ Even the brand-new edition by Chiesa, which I only got hold of later, only mentions them in passing once as “le opere spurie”, without further explanation, and in fact refers to the Chronicon once beforehand as if it might be a genuine work, just misattributed.⁶ I even spoke to two people in Oxford who’ve published on Liudprand, and they’d never heard of these texts. And web-searches only brought up the various seventeenth-century printings of these texts without contexts, and brought me back to where I’d started. So it seemed that there was really very little help to be had here beyond going back to the text and trying to figure it out.

Frontispiece of the 1640 Antwerp edition of our problem texts

I couldn’t get very far with the Google Books version; there are times when a physical edition is still just easier to page through, and those times are when you don’t know what you’re looking for. But where was I going to find a dodgy seventeenth-century edition of Liudprand of Cremona in actual paper? And the answer turned out to be: where I worked, because the Upper Library of the Queen’s College Oxford has quite a lot of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century antiquarian works they apparently bought in a rush with a bequest and among them was a slightly later Antwerp printing of the relevant text.⁷ Once I’d got the thing open before me, I first noted that this edition contained, as well as all the three ‘regular’ works, the Chronicon, a Historia de rebus suo tempore in Europa gestis, a De adversariis, a Liber de vitis romanorum pontificum and the Fragmenta, that is History of Events in Europe in His Time, On Enemies, Book of the Vices of the Roman Pontiffs and Fragments. It’s quite full. The extra ones do admittedly sound like things that Liudprand might have written, but it didn’t take very long with the Chronicon to be sure that that, at least, could not be his. For example: its second entry states that in AD 607 Muhammad began to preach ‘his error’ in Spain and was booted out by the Archbishop of Toledo; only in 619, therefore, did he translate the said error into ‘books in the Arabic language’. Charlemagne, already mentioned as a saint in the prolegomena, is recorded visiting Toledo in 781 (although the era date given corresponds to 771) in order to marry Galiana, the Christian daughter (converted, of course, by an archbishop of Toledo, a title that perhaps we should mention they did not yet use) of a King Galafrid of Toledo, Muslim despite his name. I guess that I don’t need to point out that Charlemagne never came further south into Spain than Saragossa. In 799, King Alfonso the Chaste of Asturias and Count Roland and a bunch of Frankish nobles all go on campaign together; Roland, of course, had died in 778 at Roncesvalles and probably never met Alfonso. The best one is earlier, sub anno 690 where it says that there are ten languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, and lists them as “Hispanica, Cantabrica, Græca, Latina, Arabica, Chaldæica, Huriano, Celtiberico, Galicano et Catalaunica”.⁸ It’s hard to know what’s wrongest here, but it’s all pretty crazy and not something anyone could have thought in the tenth century. In fact it’s hard to think of a time when someone could have thought it!

The Upper Library of the Queen’s College, Oxford

All this therefore raised the question of what the text is actually supposed to be, and that’s also fun. The text starts with a letter from Bishop ‘Tractemund of Elvira’, apparently meaning the real Liudprand’s real correspondent Recemund of Córdoba, telling Eutrand (as it spells him) that Tractemund has received the Antapodosis and the De rebus gestis, but he has very few other books in Elvira because the Muslims have destroyed so much and he gathers that at Eutrand’s new home in Fulda there may be a copy of the Chronicon of Maximus and Dexter. Luidprand (so spelt) then replies in a letter that follows in the edition, saying yes, as it happens they do have a copy of the Chronicon. Since it only went as far as 612, however, what he’s actually sending is his own supplement from 606 to 960, including lots of stuff about their mutual acquaintances in Spain, because, you see, these letters also make clear that Eutrand is supposed to have spent some considerable time as a subdeacon in Toledo, only going to Pavia to become a deacon later and then getting out to Germany sharply afterwards. It would be marvellous if any of it were true, but it can’t be: Liudprand’s career is well-enough documented that we can see there isn’t a gap that size in it, nor any suggestion of such a thing in the Antapadosis, written, you will remember, for a Spanish recipient. But the editor, one Jeronimo Román de la Higuera, spends some time justifying this, and in limited support, the person they get to introduce the volume says that Higuera and his colleague extracted the manuscript from Fulda’s library (something that the editors themselves do not mention, even when arguing for the authenticity of the text).⁹ But the notes, which are supplied by one Lorenzo Ramírez de Prado, are said to come from the Tamaio de Vargas edition, and it’s all extremely tangled.

It seems, however, that it is Higuera who was the problem. I did not know till I looked into this, but Higuera was one of the most notorious forgers of perhaps the entire early modern era. He is credited with so many faked texts, all more or less to the greater glory of his native Toledo, that some of his defenders (for as a prominent Jesuit he has had some) have attempted the rather weak argument that it seems impossible for one man to have forged so much, so it can’t all have been him at which rate is any of it?¹⁰ And there is something in this, because although several of the texts in the 1640 edition don’t occur in the 1635 one, the Adversaria first turning up in the younger printing, for example, the De Vitiis apparently first surfaces in an edition by itself in 1602.¹¹ And anyway, what about Tamaio? And the answer to that turns out to be that Higuera’s stuff was being banned in Spain as forgeries even in the 1630s, which is why none of this stuff was printed there, and Tamaio seems to have been more or less a conduit for Higuera in getting it out.¹² And what was it that got Higuera into trouble? Nothing other than the Chronicon omnimodae historiae of Flavius Lucius Dexter, first known from an edition by Francisco Bivar in Lyons in 1627 but apparently something in which Higuera was neck-deep anyway.¹³ So it does almost all keep going back to the one man.

Title page of the source edition of the Chronicon Dextri

Now, you will deduce from this that I eventually found some literature about this problem. In fact, the obvious thing that I should have done straight away but only thought of later was to look in the Patrologia Latina, because Migne seems to have been the last person before Chiesa to admit these texts existed. He printed the Chronicon, but he followed it with an absolutely stinging rebuttal of its authenticity by Nicolás Antonio Hispalensi from a text called the Bibliotheca Vetus Hispana, in which the author calls Higuera every kind of fraud and denounces his errors about various saints and historical figures, all of whom by some erudite confusion or in some cases, as with Charlemagne, by brass-faced error, wind up with an origin in or some connection to Toledo, in cataloguic style.¹⁴ And then, more solidly and thoroughly, there is an 1868 work by Jesús Godoy de Alcántara that sets it all into a history of seventeenth-century forgery and which is also now online, and since then some other useful bits have been written that I have eventually also found.¹⁵

All the same, it seems to me that there is still work to be done here. For a start, not all of this rubbish came directly out of Higuera’s head. Godoy identifies some sources here and there: the story of Charlemagne and Galafrid is a part of the Charlemagne legend, for example, and is a lot older than Higuera, however great it may have seemed for his purposes. But there’s a lot more that could be done, especially with the Notae that Tamaio provided to the Chronicon, which include a good few inscriptions and other texts he thought relevant entire. It would be nice at least to rule out the idea that he or Higuera had source texts that might in some cases have been from somewhere near the period they purported to recall. But what? One wants to sit down with as many of the texts as one can and slowly go through working out what the layers of accretion are, checking phrases in the Pat. Lat. to see where they’ve been lifted from and generally working out a bit more about what is clearly Higuera, what Tamaio and so on, and what is less obviously explained. And this was, of course, the point at which I shook myself, said to myself, “this is not your research. This is a dissertation topic for someone else” and dropped it. And so one reason for putting all this up here, I suppose, is in case anyone happens to want what looks like a fun thesis topic… But the main reason is that because this stuff answers to a web-search now and most of the limited scholarship is in Spanish and doesn’t, there’s every reason for someone encountering this stuff as it comes up with your search terms, not necessarily near any of the overtly crazy bits, to assume it’s genuine. So there really ought to be something out there and easy to search up saying that it’s not… Hopefully this will do!

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1. The edition Joan was using was Thomas Tamaio de Vargas (ed.), Luitprandi, sive Eutrandi e subdiacono toletano, & Ticinensi diacono episcopi cremonensis, Berengario II. Italiae Regi a Secretis, pro Othone I. Germ. Imp. ad Pont. M. & ad Imp. CP. legati Chronicon ad Tractemundum Illiberitanum in Hispania episcopum, a multis hactenus desideratum, nunc editam (Mantua 1635), online here.

2. I’m not quite sure how I did this, as I must have stumbled into the De rebus gestis discussed below, which is indeed nothing but a truncated version of the Antapodosis but is not printed in Tamaio, Chronicon, but in Jeronimo de la Higuera & Lorenzo Ramírez de Prado (edd.), Luitprandi Subdiaconi Toletani Ticinensis Diaconi tandem Cremonensis Episcopi Opera quae extant: Chronicon et aduersaria nunc primum in lucem exeunt (Antwerp 1640), which is online here.

3. This is printed in both the above editions, but it’s still not simple to cite: neither have contents pages, and they paginate each work separately. It occupies the last fifty pages bar index of the Tamaio edition. Tamaio introduces it with a title page saying that it is “Luitprando sive Eutrando hactenus attributa”, ‘until now attributed to Liudprand or Eutrand’, but by the actual text that caution has been forgotten and the reason to question the attribution is never given. The text itself is a strange bundle of 270 separate little items, some large and some no more than “In Hispania habuit Carolus Martellus multos amicos, ut apud Cantabros, & Astures.” (‘Charles Martel had lots of friends in Spain, just as he did among the Cantabrians, and the Asturians too.’ (no. 252)) Only about half are dated, and they’re arranged in seemingly indeterminate order, a few being related by theme but not all of those on one theme being gathered together. It’s a bewildering text, though the bit quoted suffices to show that it too knows more modern names than it should to be what Tamaio claimed.

4. M. Riu i Riu, “Consideraciones en torno del Cronicon Luitprandi” in Luisa D’Arienzo (ed.), Sardegna, Mediterraneo e Atlantico tra medioevo ed età moderna: studi storici in memoria di Alberto Boscolo (Roma 1993), 3 vols, II, pp. 23-29. Riu’s reference was Tamaio, Chronicon. He was a canny man but not always alert to forgery: there’s a few things in his “Diplomatari del monestir de Sant Llorenç de Morunys (971-1613)” in Urgellia Vol. 4 (Montserrat 1981), pp. 187-259, that I’m very reluctant to accept. This is such an obvious case once you read it, though, and here discussed in a memorial volume, that I’m inclined to wonder if he might have been perpetrating a joke that would have made the deceased friend or colleague laugh…

5. There are three MGH editions, Georg Heinrich Pertz (ed.), Monumenta Germaniae Historica inde ab anno Christi quingentesimo usque ad annum millesimum, Scriptorum Vol. III (Hannover 1839), pp. 264-363 (online here); Ernst Dümmler (ed.), Liudprandi episcopi cremonensis opera omnia, in usum scholarum ex Monumentis Germaniae Historicis recusa (Hannover 1877), which is now on sale all over the web in knock-off reprints from the PDF but also in the Internet Archive here, whence presumably the reprints’ source PDF; and Joseph Becker, Die Werke Liudprands von Cremona, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Scriptores rerum germanicum in usum scholarum separatim editi 41 (Hannover 1915), online here. The two translations here referred to are F. A. Wright (transl.), The Works of Liudprand of Cremona (New York City 1930) and Paolo Squatriti (transl.), The Complete Works of Liudprand of Cremona (Washington DC 2007). None of these mention any spuria where I can find it.

6. Paolo Chiesa (ed.), Liudprandi Cremonensis Opera Omnia, Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Medievalis 156 (Turnhout 1998), pp. xli & xxxviii & n. 31, where: “Il riferimento è al Chronicon ad Tractemundum di Eutrando, subdiacono di Toledo, confuso con Liutprando nell’editio princeps di quest’opera.” and a reference to the following mention.

7. None other than Higuera & Ramírez, Luitprandi Opera, in fact.

8. These cites, however, come from Tamaio, Chronicon, s. aa., simply because that was the link I opened first when finishing this post off.

9. Higuera & Ramírez, Luitprandi Opera, pp. xxviii-xxix (where they are more concerned to establish that it’s perfectly to be expected that this text would contain chunks of Pseudo-Turpin) & xlii-xlv (justifying Liudprand’s Spanish sojourn from Julian Perez’s Chronicon, printed as Iuliani Petri Archipresbyteri S. Iustae Chronicon cum eiusdem adversariis et De eremeteriis Hispaniae brevis descriptio atque ab eodem variorum carminum collectio, ex Bibliotheca olivarensi (Paris 1628), online here; there is no editor stated as such, but not only is the dedication by Lorenzo Ramírez de Prado, the copy digitised by Google is even signed by him in the flyleaves. That is, they justified their fabrications of a continuation of a false chronicle they’d already published by reference to another false chronicle that they had already published! It’s amazing. It’s only in Eric Puteano, “De Luidprandi… nova editione… Iudicium….”, in Higuera & Ramírez, Luidprandi Opera, pp. xxii-xxiv, where the claim about the manuscript is made. But cf. n. 14 below!

10. See Georges Cirot, “Documents sur le faussaire Higuera” in Bulletin hispanique Vol. 8 (Bordeaux 1906), pp. 87-95, online here; I owe this reference to Joan Vilaseca.

11. Luitprandi Ticinensis Diaconi Opusculum de vitis Romanorum Pontificium. Item Albonis Florianensis Abbatis Epitome de vitis eorundem ex Anastasii Bibliothecarij Historiae excerpta. Vtrumq: ex pervetustis Mss. Codd. membraneis descriptum, et nunc primum typis procusum (Mainz 1602), online here, pp. 1-118. Again, no editor is specified, although someone has written into the copy digitised by Google an attribution to one Jean Busée. It seems hard a priori to connect this to Higuera. The notice of this printing I got from Chiesa, Liudprandi Opera, p. xli.

12. See Jesús Godoy de Alcántara, Historia crítica de los falsos cronicones (Madrid 1868), online here, pp. 221-251.

13. Francisco Bivar (ed.), Fl. Lucii Dextri Barcinonensis, Viri Clarissimi, Orientalis Imperii Præfecti Prætorio, & D. Hieronymo amicissimi, Chronicon Omnimodæ Historiæ (Lyon 1627); see Godoy, Historia crítica, pp. 129-179.

14. Jean-Paul Migne (ed.), Ratherii Veronensis episcopi opera omnia, juxta editionem Veronensem, anno 1765, curantibus Petro et Hieronymo fratribus Balleriniis, presbyteribus Veronensis, datam, ad prelum revocata, accedunt Liutprandi Cremonensis necnon Folquini S. Bertino monacho, Gunzonis diaconis Novariensis, Richard abbati Floriacensis, Adalberti Metensis scholastici, Scripta vel Scriptorum fragmenta quae exstant, Patrologiae cursus completus series latina 136 (Paris 1853), cols 937-1180, in which cols 937B-966B reprint Nicolás Antonio Hispalensi, Bibliotheca Hispana Vetus, sive Hispani Scriptores qui ab Octaviani Augusto ævo ad annum Christi MD. floruerunt, ed. José Saenz de Aguirre (Roma 1693-1696), 2 vols, I, VI.16, and cols 965C-1133 reprint the Chronicon from Higuera & Ramírez, Luidprandi Opera, but attributing it by confusion to a non-existent Antwerp 1640 printing of Julius Reuber (ed.), Veterum scriptorum, qui caesarum et imperatorum germanicorum res per aliquot secula gestas, literis mandarunt, collectio (Frankfurt 1584), which actually contains the Antapodosis, and preceding it, cols 965C-968B, with a preface of Higuera’s which appears in neither edition! This also claims (col. 965C) that the text was “ex libro Gothico ex bibliotheca Fuldensi detracto, Wormatiamque allato” (cf. n. 9 above); Godoy, Historia crítica, pp. 200-202, notes that Higuera’s claims of a busy correspondence between Spain and Fulda were somewhat quashed by Fulda’s denying the existence of his purported manuscripts, so I suppose that’s what had happened here. Godoy then goes on in n. 1 to point out that there is actually evidence for early medieval travel between Fulda and Spain that Higuera didn’t know about, a smug feat he repeated many times in this work. Returning to Migne, Ratheri opera omnia, lastly cols 1133A-1180D reprint the Adversaria from Higuera & Ramírez, Luidprandi Opera.

15. Godoy, Historia crítica; Cirot, “Documents”; Antonio Yelo Templado, “El Cronicón del Pseudo-Dextro: proceso de redacción” in Anales de la Universidad de Murcia: Letras Vol. 43 (Murcia 1984-1985), pp. 103-121, online here; Mercedes García-Arenal & Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, The Orient in Spain: converted Muslims, the forged lead books of Granada, and the rise of Orientalism (Leiden 2009), pp. 195-224.