Salve mundi domine, Caesar noster ave! – a study of the Archpoet of Cologneês Kaiserhymnus

Abstract

Since the discovery of the manuscript 2071 of the Belgian Royal Library in the first half of the nineteenth century, containing complete versions of the two most famous songs attributed to the Archpoet of Cologne, Salve mundi domine, Caesar Noster ave! and Estuans intrinsecus, ira vehementi, the first song has aroused considerable debate about its laudatory nature and was considered it as profoundly nationalist by German historians of the 1930s and 1940s. Their analysis of the so-called Kaiserhymnus did not suffered considerable challenges until the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, the question that comes to our attention is: how to analyze in a critical and contextualized way a song considered as an imperial encomium in the same class of the Gesta Friderici of Otto of Freising and Rahewin among other works, but written by one of the greatest (if not the greater) satirists of the twelfth century? A work that markedly, to believe in traditional analysts, diverges from the author’s own canon? In order to start answering this question, we carried out a study about the relationship between the main characters involved in the text: the Archpoet and the Archbishop Rainald of Dassel, his patron as a poet and his employer as a notary of the Imperial Chancellery, a relationship in which, as pointed out by Peter Godman in his works, they developed an intense relationship of intellectual complicity. Our inspiration flowed from questions brought by the Critical Discourse Analysis and the study of Political Culture, and we dedicated this article to a translation of Kaiserhymnus for Portuguese language and to its contextualized stanza by stanza analysis, which allowed us to reach very divergent conclusions from that ones already consolidated about the song.