Dynastic History | Aachen Cathedral, the Königsthron — Thirty Coronations, or Thirty-One

Four slabs of whitish marble, clamped with bronze and set on six steps above four squat pillars: the seat in the upper gallery of Charlemagne's chapel is plainer than almost anything around it. The cathedral chapter is careful about what can be claimed for it. The throne is first documented at the coronation of Otto I in 936, the attribution to Charlemagne himself is not verified, and Charlemagne was in any case crowned emperor in Rome in 800, not here. The marble had a life before this one. Fine incised lines on one side slab form a board for nine men's morris, and the account that the slabs were carried from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is, in the chapter's own wording, a popular claim without scientific confirmation.

What happened in the chapel in 936 reaches us almost entirely through one writer: Widukind, a monk of Corvey, who finished his Deeds of the Saxons decades afterwards and dedicated it to Otto's daughter Mathilde, abbess of Quedlinburg. It is the ruling house's account of its own beginning, written for that house.

Even the tally is unsettled. The cathedral's own count is thirty kings crowned at Aachen between 936 and 1531. Thirty-one is the figure printed in most other places, sometimes for that same span and sometimes counting from 813, when Charlemagne crowned his son Louis in the palace hall rather than the church. The published figures do not agree. The last was Ferdinand of Habsburg, elected at Cologne on 5 January 1531 and anointed at Aachen days later. After him the ceremony belonged to Frankfurt.

The throne stands where it stood, with a small altar assembled from Carolingian fragments and consecrated in 1305 behind it. It can be reached only on a guided tour.

📸 Cover: Aachen Cathedral, throne of Charlemagne — Gerda Arendt, 2023, CC0 1.0.