Charlemagne Sexed His Sister and Was Into Necrophilia
Charles the Great, or Charlemagne (742 – 814), was one of the greatest figures of early medieval Europe. A Frankish king and capable military commander, he led a series of campaigns that expanded his realm, and eventually unified much of western and central Europe into what became known as the Carolingian Empire. In 800, he was crowned by Pope Leo III as “Emperor of the Romans” – the first in a line of Holy Roman Emperors that would last until Napoleon abolished the position in 1806. While inarguably a great man, Charlemagne was also a weirdo, who was into incest and necrophilia.
Charlemagne had a thing for his sister, Gillen, and had an incestuous relationship with her. Medieval accounts report that he eventually became consumed with guilt over his conduct, and visited the tomb of Saint-Gilles, near Nimes, where he prayed for forgiveness. An angel then shows up and places a parchment on the altar, declaring that the saint’s intercession worked and that God forgave Charlemagne so long as he did not repeat the sin. While the part about the angel showing up is just myth, many modern scholars give credence to the reports of incest. Charlemagne probably did sleep with Gillen, and he fathered upon her a son/ nephew, named Roland.
Sleeping with his sister was not the worst of Charlemagne’s sexually deviant practices: he reportedly had a thing for sleeping with corpses. A variety of texts from the ninth century refer to Charlemagne repeatedly engaging in, but refusing for a long time to confess to, some “unspeakable sin”. He eventually gets it off his chest and seeks absolution for what some modern scholars think was a predilection for necrophilia.
The necrophilia reports eventually gave rise to legends in which Charlemagne’s partiality to corpses extended from sexually satisfying his lusts with random corpses, to sleeping with his wife’s corpse after she died. While there are some scholarly bases for Charlemagne’s necrophilia, the parts about Charlemagne having sex with his dead wife are most likely exaggerations and legends. However, they are indicative of the field day contemporaries had with Charlemagne’s necrophilia, working up the sufficiently shocking reports of that perversion into even bigger myths.
