In 1877, seven years after the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, visited Metz. The employees of the mayor’s office, all Germans, gathered on the roof of St. Stephen’s Cathedral to celebrate his visit with a fireworks display. In the process, the entire roof of the cathedral burned down, and a multi-year renovation of the edifice became necessary. This renovation included not only the reconstruction of the damaged roof, but also a major redefinition of the rest of the building. By this time, Neo-Gothic architecture had become the preferred style for representational construction and reconstruction all over the western world. Nationalist German circles had even decided (erroneously) that Gothic architecture had been invented in medieval Germany, during Hohenstaufen dynasty’s rule in the Holy Roman Empire (c. 1138-1254), and was therefore ideal for re-Germanizing recently annexed French regions. As a consequence, the renovation of Metz Cathedral not only replaced the damaged roof, but also replaced the Neo-Classical western portal with a Gothic one. For the statue of the prophet Daniel, the sculptor used the face of Emperor William II as his model. Shortly after World War I, the hands of the statue were handcuffed, and a scroll with the text Sic transit gloria mundi was added. Several postcards were created of this moment in time, but the handcuffs and sign were soon taken off. Later, the sculpture’s moustache was removed to minimize the resemblance with the emperor.
One of the photographs of William II that may have served as model for the sculptor, who added the emperor to the façade of Metz Cathedral.
This episode in the history of Metz Cathedral reveals that much of what we see and know about medieval culture today is not based on original medieval artifacts and texts, but on modern reconstructions, reimaginations, and interpretations of those texts and artifacts. And most of these modern responses happen during a time when European nations enter into an arms race for political, military, economic, and cultural superiority that will lead to multiple regional altercations and two world wars. Certain fake ideas about the medieval past become a central reference point for these nations as they strive to create distinctive national identities in support of their various goals. Medieval culture is co-opted as a “usable past” and made to serve national ideologies.
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Castles and cathedrals, among the most visible remnants of the Middle Ages, are among the most popular sites for the creation of national pride. Like Metz Cathedral, Wilhelm II had the castle ruin of Hohkönigsburg restored as a reminder of the Alsace region’s origins in German history, and he ordered a similar restoration for the Marienburg (Malbork Castle) in West Prussia, to honor the memory of the medieval Teutonic knights and protect Germany’s historical rights to a region also claimed by Poland. If Wilhelm tried to build his own German empire as a second Reich that revived the original or first Reich of Frederick Barbarossa, Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists used the same medieval roots for their own claims to power in their co-called Third Reich: In the early 1930s, the restored Marienburg was turned into a destination for annual pilgrimage trips of both the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. Moreover, it served as a model for the National Socialist Order Castles, special castle-like schools erected to create the impression of a connection to a vague glorious past and reserved for the education of elite Nazi echelons.
The restoration of Hohkönigsburg between 1901 and 1908 – Wikimedia Commons
In the middle of the nineteenth century, Cologne cathedral actually came to represent the hopes and dreams of the German bourgeoisie, whose members saw in its unfinished state a fitting symbol of the ever-unfinished German nation. Construction had stalled since c. 1560, with a large wooden crane left standing ever since some 56 meters above the ground, at the top of the south tower. Budding ideas about historic preservation, combined with powerful national fervor, led to the Cathedral Construction Festival (Dombaufest) of 1842, an event that also united regional patriotism, Catholic religiosity, the desire for peaceful reconciliation between church and state, plans to integrate the Rhineland into Prussia, Bourgeois enthusiasm for the arts, and Romantic enthusiasm for history. The recurring ideas of God, Culture/Art, and the Fatherland were all seen to have their most masterly exemplification in Cologne cathedral because it offered outstanding testimony of German medieval greatness and therefore of the German national character, and because the supra-regional effort to repair and finalize its construction was supposed to equal the enormous supra-regional political efforts necessary to forge and bring to perfection the new German nation. The medieval cathedral, finished in modern times, became a premier secular memorial site of an imagined glorified past and of a willed and deliberately signifying monument for the future.
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Cologne Cathedral on September 4th, 1842, cornerstone ceremony for the restart of construction work – illustration by Georg Osterwald
In France, the architects Ludovic Vitet (1802-1873) and Eugene Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879) added other politically acceptable national readings of the cathedral. Intent on demonstrating the relevance of the cathedrals and the need for their completion and restoration, they claimed that the cathedrals’ construction had been a way of protesting against the medieval feudal system. Moreover, aware of the signs of the time, Viollet-le-Duc, in an influential article for the Dictionnaire raisonnée de l’architecture française (1866) was eager to confirm the rootedness of the French cathedrals in his nation’s historical path:
The monarchic and religious unity, the alliance of the two powers to constitute one nationality caused the growth of the great cathedrals in Northern France. While cathedrals certainly are also religious monuments, they are most of all national edifices of the French nationality, the first and most powerful attempt towards unity.
These and similar arguments made it possible to endow the medieval cathedral with all those values, freedom of thought, secular spirit, and nationality, which the liberal bourgeoisie as well as the anti-clerical intellectuals were able to accept. Thus, in the second half of the nineteenth century, not only did most French cathedrals undergo restoration, as in Nantes, Limoges, Moulins, but new ones were built as in Gap, Digne, and Marseille, more often than not in Neo-Gothic styles. Most visitors to these restored or newly built cathedrals assume, wrongly, that the buildings bear authentic witness to the medieval past. Even if architects and scientists did their best to base their work on what they knew about medieval construction, the results really are modern reimaginations.
This has once again become obvious in the aftermath of the 2019 fire at Notre Dame de Paris, the medieval French cathedral most often used as a memorial site for secular national ceremonies, for example General DeGaulle’s funeral in 1970. The question about how to rebuild the severely damaged building evolved into a nation-wide discussion. In the end, the proponents of the plan to faithfully reconstruct the nineteenth-century version restored by Viollet-le-Duc (including his redesigned spire) won out over plans to aim for a late medieval version or a version adding contemporary architectural gestures. The French Senate determined that the reconstruction be faithful to its “last known visual state,” and Philippe Villeneuve, the cathedral’s chief architect, even threatened to resign if Notre-Dame was not rebuilt the way Viollet-le-Duc had conceived it. French president Emmanuel Macron’s ambitious goal to restore the cathedral by the 2024 Paris Olympics is further evidence of the contemporary importance of the medieval past to advance national political aspirations.
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Can the prestige of the medieval cathedral travel across the Atlantic and function successfully in a predominantly Protestant nation? Washington’s National Cathedral, which took only a little less time to build (83 years) than some of its medieval predecessor models, was meant to provide exactly such a unifying secular function for the United States of America: George Washington (1732-1799) and Pierre ‘Peter’ Charles L’Enfant (1754-1825), a French-American military engineer, were the first to propose a vision for building a ‘great church for national purposes in the early days of the republic. More than 100 years later, construction began for a church that used fourteenth-century English Gothic style as its historical inspiration, but added unique American features. It represents the important historical connections with Great Britain’s medieval past, but also celebrates the nation’s own and independent postcolonial path: The “space window” commemorates U.S. astronauts landing on the moon with Apollo 11; numerous statues and stained-glass windows show the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, and George Washington; and among the 112 gargoyles there are depictions of everyday American life: a young girl with a mouthful of braces, a pacifist with a gas mask, a Yuppie businessman, a naughty grandson who just pinched a cookie out of a cookie jar and, of course, the head of Darth Vader from the Star Wars movies. Thus, although officially an Episcopal church, the cathedral’s many secular features indicate its function as a national prayer house for all the nation’s citizens. Unsurprisingly, it has been the location of funeral and memorial services for nearly all U.S. presidents since 1893 as well as for the memorial service for the victims of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.
Just as medieval or medievalized cathedrals and castles have served to help individuals to imagine themselves as part of a national community, so do literary works. In their search for such foundational narratives, modern nations and their thought leaders have often scoured medieval epics for fictional heroes to determine character traits and values presumably unique to one specific nation. Once a medieval epic was imagined as representing the nation, they were included in the canon of texts taught at universities and in schools. In France, The Song of Roland, the oldest surviving major literary work in medieval French, was elevated to becoming France’s national epic. It is a fictional rendering of the Battle of Roncevaux Pass (778), during the reign of Charlemagne. The medieval text became prestigious enough to be edited by Joseph Bédier (1864-1938), a professor at the Collège de France, as part of a pointed patriotic labor of love to combat the overbearing influence of transrhenian competitors in the study of French literature. Bédier would even go so far as to collect and interpret German soldiers’ diaries to prove the moral depravity of the enemy. Officers during World War I would read particularly heroic sections from medieval epics before sending their soldiers into battle, and political speeches abounded with comparisons between modern soldiers and medieval knights.
Already in the second half of the nineteenth-century, British, Danish, and German scholars were involved in a cultural arms race about which nation could lay claim to the ninth-century epic, Beowulf. Transmitted in a single manuscript, the narrative was set in medieval Scandinavia, written in Old English, and its genre features followed the tradition of the Germanic heroic legend. The stakes of claiming the early medieval text were such that imperial Germany’s first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) got involved personally: For the first chair of English philology at the Reichsuniversität in occupied Strasbourg, he supported a Beowulf specialist, Bernhard ten Brink (1841-1892), whose work on Old English, a Germanic language, was supposed to help boost the Germanization of Alsace-Lorraine. The German government took things even one step further by naming one of its coastal defense battleships after the medieval epic hero in 1915. The SMS Beowulf was part of the six-vessel Siegfried class, named after the fictional hero of Germany’s national epic, the Middle High German Nibelungenlied (c. 1200), which also inspired Richard Wagner’s operatic Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle (written between 1848 and 1874). Although the nationalist reception of the Nibelungenlied began as early as in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and continues until today, the National Socialists paid special attention to it. Hitler’s imperial marshall, Hermann Göring, for example, famously compared the death-defying sacrifice of the heroes toward the end of the medieval epic to the sacrifice of the German armies at Stalingrad. Hitler himself, enamored with imagining himself as the reincarnation of medieval ruler, called Göring his “paladin” (the title used in medieval chivalric romance for one of the top knights surrounding and protecting the king) and had himself painted as a medieval Teutonic knight by artist Hubert Lanzinger (Der Bannerträger, 1936).
One of the most common patterns for using the medieval past is to link and legitimize modern national characteristics with famous medieval heroic figures, real ones as well as fictional ones. One of the founding fathers of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, for example, imagined that the new nation’s political and legal principles and form of government had their origins in Saxon law, brought to the British Isles by the Germanic tribes who crossed the Channel between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and not by the feudal system established by the Normans after 1066. Eager to bolster the idea of American independence and the righteousness of the American Revolution, he maintained that by virtue of this Saxon law the settlers of the American continent were subjects of the British crown by consent only, and that King George III did not actually hold title to the land. To visualize and anchor this conviction, he proposed that the official seal for United States show the brothers Hengist and Horsa, two Saxon leaders who, according to legend, were among the first Germanic warriors to reach the island.
Jefferson’s (rejected) seal of the United States, showing Hengist and Horsa
Few medieval figures have found as many modern nationalist applications as the mythographic King Arthur. Winston Churchill, in The Birth of Britain (1956), likened the valiant fighting spirit of British troops in their battle against Nazi Germany to the battle deeds of Arthur and his knights. Willfully ignoring the absence of scientific evidence for the existence of a historical Arthur, he turned him into a prefiguration of his own and his generals’ heroic leadership role during World War II, creating a linear continuity between early medieval England and his own contemporary Britain. U.S. President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) grew up in an Anglo-American culture steeped in the stories surrounding King Arthur. After his assassination, his wife, Jaqueline, and the U.S. media exalted his presidency of only 1,000 days based on JFK’s favorite Broadway musical, Camelot (1960), which celebrated the story of Arthur as a bright and shining moment during which, so the entire nation was meant to believe, goodness and justice reigned supreme. Americans, shocked and dispirited by the president’s assassination, eagerly embraced the nostalgic fiction that their young and energetic leader had been a modern reincarnation of the legendary medieval ruler.
While one might assume that the advent of the European Union would have led to a diminution in the nationalist use of an imagined medieval past in the second half of the twentieth century, the opposite seems to be the case. On the one hand, the altercations about claiming “Carolus Magnus” as a forefather for France or Germany subsided and were replaced by the reasonable and realistic notion that the Frankish king ‘belonged’ to numerous modern European nations and regions; on the other hand, the shift of economic and social authority from individual nation states to a multinational association of 20+ countries revived ethnonationalist independence movements in some regions, anti-European neonationalist movements in others. The release of the Mel Gibson Hollywood movie, Braveheart, in 1995, for example, ignited Scottish enthusiasm for independence from the United Kingdom. The blockbuster, which won five Oscars, including Best Picture, tells the dramatic story of William Wallace, a Scottish leader who resists English domination at the end of the thirteenth century. Although replete with historical inaccuracies, the medievalist movie reminded Scottish audiences of a heroic pre-colonial time when they were not under English rule. In fact, Scottish nationalist politicians used the movie’s negative description of the English to tap into the growing Anglophobia among many Scots towards the end of the twentieth century and looked to the European Union’s focus on regions instead of nations as a helpful lever to throw off the English yoke. The nostalgic yearning for an independent premodern Scotland also played a role when 62% of Scottish voters voted against Brexit in 2019.
In England, where a majority of voters voted in favor of Brexit, Tommy Robinson and the members of his white ultra-nationalist English Defence League fetishizes “Englishness” as symbolized in the flag of St. George, the fourth-century patron saint of England, and rejects the post-medieval Union Jack, the British flag, which is inclusive of England, Scotland, Wales and, by extension, others.
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In France, a country highly supportive of the European Union, the right wing Front National, rebranded as Rassemblement National in 2018, has resisted the nation’s ceding national sovereignty to supra-national European governing bodies. Propagating conservative Catholicism, traditional gender roles, and xenophobic ethnonationalism, the party leaders have publicly expressed a strong affinity with Joan of Arc as a medieval French foremother who defended the nation against foreign (English) invasion, exemplifies traditional femininity (virgin), and died for her Christian faith.
The medieval past has been reimagined for numerous benign and praiseworthy causes in the arts, culture, music, politics, and religion. This fascinating malleability of our predecessor period, facilitated by the hundreds of years that separate us from it, makes it appear like an almost empty signifier which can be applied to almost any purpose. Despite the efforts of generations of scholars to avoid irresponsible presentist appropriations and falsifications of medieval culture, the vast majority of nationalist reimaginations of medieval culture in modern times has been in the service of retrograde autocratic, totalitarian, antisemitic, homophobic, racist, and xenophobic ideologies.
While these tendencies have become visible in numerous countries, its most blatant current manifestations exist in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Putin, as Dina Khapaeva has shown, openly supports Russia’s ultra-nationalist Eurasia Party, a political movement led by the pro-fascist mystic Alexander Dugin. Dugin and his followers strive to revive Ivan the Terrible as what they consider the best incarnation of an authentic Russian tradition, namely authoritarian monarchy. “Eurasianism” as an ideology actively advocates for the embrace of a new Middle Ages, in which the last remnants of Russian democracy are replaced by a powerful autocrat. Eurasianists hope for the return of what they imagine as a medieval social order within which Ivan’s Russian empire would be restored, the Orthodox church would take control over culture and education, and slavery become an acceptable feature of society. As the visible result of the alliance between Putin and the Eurasianists, several statues of Ivan the Terrible have been erected in recent years, and there was a proposal to rename Moscow’s Lenin Avenue into Ivan the Terrible Highway. In a complete denial of historical fact, Putin even claimed that Ivan the Terrible never killed anyone.
In Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, the government and far-right groups have been pushing a similarly simplified and retrograde version of the Middle Ages to justify their agenda. Overall, Bolsonaro wants to define his country as the triumphant realization of a white, patriarchal, and Christian medieval Portugal, thus making white Brazilians the true heirs to an imagined glorious Portuguese medieval past. It also allows Bolsonaro and the Brazilian far-right to oppose modern secular democracy and gender equality in favor of patriarchy, homophobia, misogyny, religious intolerance, and racism, all propagated in political speeches and social media. A particularly vile Islamophobic YouTube documentary (“Brazil: The Last Crusade”) in defense of this kind of Brazil, for example, focuses on the Arab conquest of the Iberian Peninsula and the Crusades and celebrates the role of the Templar Knights in European and Portuguese history, including the Reconquista and the South American expansion.
If, during the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century isolationist nationalist reimaginations of the Middle Ages were most often separate and independent, the advent of the internet has rendered them globally connected. Their proponents’ transnational collaboration and insidious abuse of the communicative freedom afforded by new technologies and especially social media have allowed far-right medievalist nationalism to become a world-wide phenomenon, to the point where they emulate each others’ talking points and use each others’ publications as authenticating sources. And so it is not surprising that Bolsonaro’s and Putin’s medievalisms share numerous direct connectivities with those employed by Italy’s Matteo Salvini, the United States of America’s Richard Spencer, Steve Bannon, and Donald Trump, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. To communicate their goals successfully, medievalizing nationalists, via blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, etc., first disconnect any claims they would like to make from the actual past events, texts, and artifacts they would like to appropriate. Once disconnected from any protective historical reality, they can be ceaselessly repurposed and repeated into banal tropes and memes of the Middle Ages, including those in support of political positions completely unrelated to anything we know about medieval culture. As Andrew B.R. Elliot explains in his 2017 study on Medievalism, Politics, and Mass Media, the overwhelming ubiquity of these fake imaginations of medieval culture renders them pretty much impervious to scholarly critique and scientific rectification. Only a major and concerted legal and educational effort to protect fact from mythography may be able to reign in the most vile and deleterious political campaigns of misinformation.
Richard Utz is Professor of Literature, Media, and Communication and Associate Dean for Faculty Development in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology. A revised French version of this essay, co-authored with Anne-Françoise Le Lostec, is forthcoming as “Moyen Âge et nationalisme,” in FAKE MOYEN ÂGE! ou comment le Moyen Âge est imaginé à travers les films,la bande dessinée, les jeux vidéo, la pop culture, ed. Laurent Gerverau (Argentat-sur-Dordogne, France: Nuage Vert, 2022), pp. 245-61.
By Richard Utz
In 1877, seven years after the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, visited Metz. The employees of the mayor’s office, all Germans, gathered on the roof of St. Stephen’s Cathedral to celebrate his visit with a fireworks display. In the process, the entire roof of the cathedral burned down, and a multi-year renovation of the edifice became necessary. This renovation included not only the reconstruction of the damaged roof, but also a major redefinition of the rest of the building. By this time, Neo-Gothic architecture had become the preferred style for representational construction and reconstruction all over the western world. Nationalist German circles had even decided (erroneously) that Gothic architecture had been invented in medieval Germany, during Hohenstaufen dynasty’s rule in the Holy Roman Empire (c. 1138-1254), and was therefore ideal for re-Germanizing recently annexed French regions. As a consequence, the renovation of Metz Cathedral not only replaced the damaged roof, but also replaced the Neo-Classical western portal with a Gothic one. For the statue of the prophet Daniel, the sculptor used the face of Emperor William II as his model. Shortly after World War I, the hands of the statue were handcuffed, and a scroll with the text Sic transit gloria mundi was added. Several postcards were created of this moment in time, but the handcuffs and sign were soon taken off. Later, the sculpture’s moustache was removed to minimize the resemblance with the emperor.
This episode in the history of Metz Cathedral reveals that much of what we see and know about medieval culture today is not based on original medieval artifacts and texts, but on modern reconstructions, reimaginations, and interpretations of those texts and artifacts. And most of these modern responses happen during a time when European nations enter into an arms race for political, military, economic, and cultural superiority that will lead to multiple regional altercations and two world wars. Certain fake ideas about the medieval past become a central reference point for these nations as they strive to create distinctive national identities in support of their various goals. Medieval culture is co-opted as a “usable past” and made to serve national ideologies.
Castles and cathedrals, among the most visible remnants of the Middle Ages, are among the most popular sites for the creation of national pride. Like Metz Cathedral, Wilhelm II had the castle ruin of Hohkönigsburg restored as a reminder of the Alsace region’s origins in German history, and he ordered a similar restoration for the Marienburg (Malbork Castle) in West Prussia, to honor the memory of the medieval Teutonic knights and protect Germany’s historical rights to a region also claimed by Poland. If Wilhelm tried to build his own German empire as a second Reich that revived the original or first Reich of Frederick Barbarossa, Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists used the same medieval roots for their own claims to power in their co-called Third Reich: In the early 1930s, the restored Marienburg was turned into a destination for annual pilgrimage trips of both the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. Moreover, it served as a model for the National Socialist Order Castles, special castle-like schools erected to create the impression of a connection to a vague glorious past and reserved for the education of elite Nazi echelons.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, Cologne cathedral actually came to represent the hopes and dreams of the German bourgeoisie, whose members saw in its unfinished state a fitting symbol of the ever-unfinished German nation. Construction had stalled since c. 1560, with a large wooden crane left standing ever since some 56 meters above the ground, at the top of the south tower. Budding ideas about historic preservation, combined with powerful national fervor, led to the Cathedral Construction Festival (Dombaufest) of 1842, an event that also united regional patriotism, Catholic religiosity, the desire for peaceful reconciliation between church and state, plans to integrate the Rhineland into Prussia, Bourgeois enthusiasm for the arts, and Romantic enthusiasm for history. The recurring ideas of God, Culture/Art, and the Fatherland were all seen to have their most masterly exemplification in Cologne cathedral because it offered outstanding testimony of German medieval greatness and therefore of the German national character, and because the supra-regional effort to repair and finalize its construction was supposed to equal the enormous supra-regional political efforts necessary to forge and bring to perfection the new German nation. The medieval cathedral, finished in modern times, became a premier secular memorial site of an imagined glorified past and of a willed and deliberately signifying monument for the future.
In France, the architects Ludovic Vitet (1802-1873) and Eugene Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879) added other politically acceptable national readings of the cathedral. Intent on demonstrating the relevance of the cathedrals and the need for their completion and restoration, they claimed that the cathedrals’ construction had been a way of protesting against the medieval feudal system. Moreover, aware of the signs of the time, Viollet-le-Duc, in an influential article for the Dictionnaire raisonnée de l’architecture française (1866) was eager to confirm the rootedness of the French cathedrals in his nation’s historical path:
The monarchic and religious unity, the alliance of the two powers to constitute one nationality caused the growth of the great cathedrals in Northern France. While cathedrals certainly are also religious monuments, they are most of all national edifices of the French nationality, the first and most powerful attempt towards unity.
These and similar arguments made it possible to endow the medieval cathedral with all those values, freedom of thought, secular spirit, and nationality, which the liberal bourgeoisie as well as the anti-clerical intellectuals were able to accept. Thus, in the second half of the nineteenth century, not only did most French cathedrals undergo restoration, as in Nantes, Limoges, Moulins, but new ones were built as in Gap, Digne, and Marseille, more often than not in Neo-Gothic styles. Most visitors to these restored or newly built cathedrals assume, wrongly, that the buildings bear authentic witness to the medieval past. Even if architects and scientists did their best to base their work on what they knew about medieval construction, the results really are modern reimaginations.
This has once again become obvious in the aftermath of the 2019 fire at Notre Dame de Paris, the medieval French cathedral most often used as a memorial site for secular national ceremonies, for example General DeGaulle’s funeral in 1970. The question about how to rebuild the severely damaged building evolved into a nation-wide discussion. In the end, the proponents of the plan to faithfully reconstruct the nineteenth-century version restored by Viollet-le-Duc (including his redesigned spire) won out over plans to aim for a late medieval version or a version adding contemporary architectural gestures. The French Senate determined that the reconstruction be faithful to its “last known visual state,” and Philippe Villeneuve, the cathedral’s chief architect, even threatened to resign if Notre-Dame was not rebuilt the way Viollet-le-Duc had conceived it. French president Emmanuel Macron’s ambitious goal to restore the cathedral by the 2024 Paris Olympics is further evidence of the contemporary importance of the medieval past to advance national political aspirations.
Can the prestige of the medieval cathedral travel across the Atlantic and function successfully in a predominantly Protestant nation? Washington’s National Cathedral, which took only a little less time to build (83 years) than some of its medieval predecessor models, was meant to provide exactly such a unifying secular function for the United States of America: George Washington (1732-1799) and Pierre ‘Peter’ Charles L’Enfant (1754-1825), a French-American military engineer, were the first to propose a vision for building a ‘great church for national purposes in the early days of the republic. More than 100 years later, construction began for a church that used fourteenth-century English Gothic style as its historical inspiration, but added unique American features. It represents the important historical connections with Great Britain’s medieval past, but also celebrates the nation’s own and independent postcolonial path: The “space window” commemorates U.S. astronauts landing on the moon with Apollo 11; numerous statues and stained-glass windows show the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, and George Washington; and among the 112 gargoyles there are depictions of everyday American life: a young girl with a mouthful of braces, a pacifist with a gas mask, a Yuppie businessman, a naughty grandson who just pinched a cookie out of a cookie jar and, of course, the head of Darth Vader from the Star Wars movies. Thus, although officially an Episcopal church, the cathedral’s many secular features indicate its function as a national prayer house for all the nation’s citizens. Unsurprisingly, it has been the location of funeral and memorial services for nearly all U.S. presidents since 1893 as well as for the memorial service for the victims of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.
Just as medieval or medievalized cathedrals and castles have served to help individuals to imagine themselves as part of a national community, so do literary works. In their search for such foundational narratives, modern nations and their thought leaders have often scoured medieval epics for fictional heroes to determine character traits and values presumably unique to one specific nation. Once a medieval epic was imagined as representing the nation, they were included in the canon of texts taught at universities and in schools. In France, The Song of Roland, the oldest surviving major literary work in medieval French, was elevated to becoming France’s national epic. It is a fictional rendering of the Battle of Roncevaux Pass (778), during the reign of Charlemagne. The medieval text became prestigious enough to be edited by Joseph Bédier (1864-1938), a professor at the Collège de France, as part of a pointed patriotic labor of love to combat the overbearing influence of transrhenian competitors in the study of French literature. Bédier would even go so far as to collect and interpret German soldiers’ diaries to prove the moral depravity of the enemy. Officers during World War I would read particularly heroic sections from medieval epics before sending their soldiers into battle, and political speeches abounded with comparisons between modern soldiers and medieval knights.
Already in the second half of the nineteenth-century, British, Danish, and German scholars were involved in a cultural arms race about which nation could lay claim to the ninth-century epic, Beowulf. Transmitted in a single manuscript, the narrative was set in medieval Scandinavia, written in Old English, and its genre features followed the tradition of the Germanic heroic legend. The stakes of claiming the early medieval text were such that imperial Germany’s first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) got involved personally: For the first chair of English philology at the Reichsuniversität in occupied Strasbourg, he supported a Beowulf specialist, Bernhard ten Brink (1841-1892), whose work on Old English, a Germanic language, was supposed to help boost the Germanization of Alsace-Lorraine. The German government took things even one step further by naming one of its coastal defense battleships after the medieval epic hero in 1915. The SMS Beowulf was part of the six-vessel Siegfried class, named after the fictional hero of Germany’s national epic, the Middle High German Nibelungenlied (c. 1200), which also inspired Richard Wagner’s operatic Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle (written between 1848 and 1874). Although the nationalist reception of the Nibelungenlied began as early as in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and continues until today, the National Socialists paid special attention to it. Hitler’s imperial marshall, Hermann Göring, for example, famously compared the death-defying sacrifice of the heroes toward the end of the medieval epic to the sacrifice of the German armies at Stalingrad. Hitler himself, enamored with imagining himself as the reincarnation of medieval ruler, called Göring his “paladin” (the title used in medieval chivalric romance for one of the top knights surrounding and protecting the king) and had himself painted as a medieval Teutonic knight by artist Hubert Lanzinger (Der Bannerträger, 1936).
One of the most common patterns for using the medieval past is to link and legitimize modern national characteristics with famous medieval heroic figures, real ones as well as fictional ones. One of the founding fathers of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, for example, imagined that the new nation’s political and legal principles and form of government had their origins in Saxon law, brought to the British Isles by the Germanic tribes who crossed the Channel between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and not by the feudal system established by the Normans after 1066. Eager to bolster the idea of American independence and the righteousness of the American Revolution, he maintained that by virtue of this Saxon law the settlers of the American continent were subjects of the British crown by consent only, and that King George III did not actually hold title to the land. To visualize and anchor this conviction, he proposed that the official seal for United States show the brothers Hengist and Horsa, two Saxon leaders who, according to legend, were among the first Germanic warriors to reach the island.
Few medieval figures have found as many modern nationalist applications as the mythographic King Arthur. Winston Churchill, in The Birth of Britain (1956), likened the valiant fighting spirit of British troops in their battle against Nazi Germany to the battle deeds of Arthur and his knights. Willfully ignoring the absence of scientific evidence for the existence of a historical Arthur, he turned him into a prefiguration of his own and his generals’ heroic leadership role during World War II, creating a linear continuity between early medieval England and his own contemporary Britain. U.S. President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) grew up in an Anglo-American culture steeped in the stories surrounding King Arthur. After his assassination, his wife, Jaqueline, and the U.S. media exalted his presidency of only 1,000 days based on JFK’s favorite Broadway musical, Camelot (1960), which celebrated the story of Arthur as a bright and shining moment during which, so the entire nation was meant to believe, goodness and justice reigned supreme. Americans, shocked and dispirited by the president’s assassination, eagerly embraced the nostalgic fiction that their young and energetic leader had been a modern reincarnation of the legendary medieval ruler.
While one might assume that the advent of the European Union would have led to a diminution in the nationalist use of an imagined medieval past in the second half of the twentieth century, the opposite seems to be the case. On the one hand, the altercations about claiming “Carolus Magnus” as a forefather for France or Germany subsided and were replaced by the reasonable and realistic notion that the Frankish king ‘belonged’ to numerous modern European nations and regions; on the other hand, the shift of economic and social authority from individual nation states to a multinational association of 20+ countries revived ethnonationalist independence movements in some regions, anti-European neonationalist movements in others. The release of the Mel Gibson Hollywood movie, Braveheart, in 1995, for example, ignited Scottish enthusiasm for independence from the United Kingdom. The blockbuster, which won five Oscars, including Best Picture, tells the dramatic story of William Wallace, a Scottish leader who resists English domination at the end of the thirteenth century. Although replete with historical inaccuracies, the medievalist movie reminded Scottish audiences of a heroic pre-colonial time when they were not under English rule. In fact, Scottish nationalist politicians used the movie’s negative description of the English to tap into the growing Anglophobia among many Scots towards the end of the twentieth century and looked to the European Union’s focus on regions instead of nations as a helpful lever to throw off the English yoke. The nostalgic yearning for an independent premodern Scotland also played a role when 62% of Scottish voters voted against Brexit in 2019.
In England, where a majority of voters voted in favor of Brexit, Tommy Robinson and the members of his white ultra-nationalist English Defence League fetishizes “Englishness” as symbolized in the flag of St. George, the fourth-century patron saint of England, and rejects the post-medieval Union Jack, the British flag, which is inclusive of England, Scotland, Wales and, by extension, others.
In France, a country highly supportive of the European Union, the right wing Front National, rebranded as Rassemblement National in 2018, has resisted the nation’s ceding national sovereignty to supra-national European governing bodies. Propagating conservative Catholicism, traditional gender roles, and xenophobic ethnonationalism, the party leaders have publicly expressed a strong affinity with Joan of Arc as a medieval French foremother who defended the nation against foreign (English) invasion, exemplifies traditional femininity (virgin), and died for her Christian faith.
The medieval past has been reimagined for numerous benign and praiseworthy causes in the arts, culture, music, politics, and religion. This fascinating malleability of our predecessor period, facilitated by the hundreds of years that separate us from it, makes it appear like an almost empty signifier which can be applied to almost any purpose. Despite the efforts of generations of scholars to avoid irresponsible presentist appropriations and falsifications of medieval culture, the vast majority of nationalist reimaginations of medieval culture in modern times has been in the service of retrograde autocratic, totalitarian, antisemitic, homophobic, racist, and xenophobic ideologies.
While these tendencies have become visible in numerous countries, its most blatant current manifestations exist in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Putin, as Dina Khapaeva has shown, openly supports Russia’s ultra-nationalist Eurasia Party, a political movement led by the pro-fascist mystic Alexander Dugin. Dugin and his followers strive to revive Ivan the Terrible as what they consider the best incarnation of an authentic Russian tradition, namely authoritarian monarchy. “Eurasianism” as an ideology actively advocates for the embrace of a new Middle Ages, in which the last remnants of Russian democracy are replaced by a powerful autocrat. Eurasianists hope for the return of what they imagine as a medieval social order within which Ivan’s Russian empire would be restored, the Orthodox church would take control over culture and education, and slavery become an acceptable feature of society. As the visible result of the alliance between Putin and the Eurasianists, several statues of Ivan the Terrible have been erected in recent years, and there was a proposal to rename Moscow’s Lenin Avenue into Ivan the Terrible Highway. In a complete denial of historical fact, Putin even claimed that Ivan the Terrible never killed anyone.
In Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, the government and far-right groups have been pushing a similarly simplified and retrograde version of the Middle Ages to justify their agenda. Overall, Bolsonaro wants to define his country as the triumphant realization of a white, patriarchal, and Christian medieval Portugal, thus making white Brazilians the true heirs to an imagined glorious Portuguese medieval past. It also allows Bolsonaro and the Brazilian far-right to oppose modern secular democracy and gender equality in favor of patriarchy, homophobia, misogyny, religious intolerance, and racism, all propagated in political speeches and social media. A particularly vile Islamophobic YouTube documentary (“Brazil: The Last Crusade”) in defense of this kind of Brazil, for example, focuses on the Arab conquest of the Iberian Peninsula and the Crusades and celebrates the role of the Templar Knights in European and Portuguese history, including the Reconquista and the South American expansion.
Richard Utz is Professor of Literature, Media, and Communication and Associate Dean for Faculty Development in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology. A revised French version of this essay, co-authored with Anne-Françoise Le Lostec, is forthcoming as “Moyen Âge et nationalisme,” in FAKE MOYEN ÂGE! ou comment le Moyen Âge est imaginé à travers les films,la bande dessinée, les jeux vidéo, la pop culture, ed. Laurent Gerverau (Argentat-sur-Dordogne, France: Nuage Vert, 2022), pp. 245-61.
Top Image: By Fab5669 / Wikimedia Commons
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