Von Belin, einem Rätsel am Jakobsweg, von der Begräbnisliste des PseudoTurpin und von Herzog Naimes

• Main Author: Gustav Adolf Beckmann
• Format: Article
• Language: deu
• Published: Turismo de Galicia-S.A. de Xestión do Plan Xacobeo 2011-07-01
• Series: Ad Limina
• Subjects: liber sancti jacobi; pseudo-turpín
• Online Access: https://www.caminodesantiago.gal/documents/17639/362239/Ad_Limina_II.+02_Gustav+Adolf+Beckmann.pdf

According to the Pseudo-Turpin (PT, around 1150), the Frankish Roncevaux victims were buried at Blaye, Arles, Bordeaux and, astonishingly enough, at Belin, a small place some 40 km south of Bordeaux. The following article is devoted to three questions: 1) What did the PT see at Belin? 2) According to what principles did he distribute the individual warriors among the different places? And 3) what predestined tiny Belin for its part in the tradition? Ad 1) At Belin, the PT adopted a local (probably rather rudimentary) tradition that a certain tumulus was the tomb of Roncevaux victims. (This tradition, however, fell into oblivion shortly after the PT, possibly because the tumulus was destroyed during the construction of Belin castle or, at any rate, because the tradition came into unsuccessful conflict, a) for Oliver, with the rapidly consolidating and more appealing Blaye tradition claiming by then also Oliver, and b) for other heroes, with what was told in their own chansons de geste.) Ad 2) The PT distributed the burials according very simple principles recognized hitherto only in part: for Roland’s tomb at Blaye, the PT could not disregard a tradition which at that moment was already firm for Roland only (not yet for Oliver, let alone Turpin); Belin received those warriors whose home, in the opinion of the PT, was still so far away that the survivors, despairing of transporting the decaying corpses till there, decided for a collective emergency burial – an idea which also accounted for the simple form of the‚ tomb’ he saw. The other corpses were distributed among France’s two most renowned cemeteries, at Arles and Bordeaux, depending on which of the two was closer to the individual warrior’s home. In keeping with this, Duke Naimes was buried at Arles, because for the author of the PT, Naimes was‚ of Bavaria’, not, of Bayonne’. 3) At Belin, the tumulus-based tradition, preexistent to the PT, probably owes its existence to the fact that pilgrims and warriors returning from Spain considered Belin –on the same grounds as Blaye, but at other times– as‚ the first place in France proper’ and therefore as the first place where Charlemagne could have fulfilled his moral duty of burying the corpses‚ in native soil’