The third chapter delivers a reassessment of the cult of Charlemagne from his death in 814 to Frederick Barbarossa’s accession in 1152. The use of local Aquensian and regional Lotharingian material shows that the widely known developments of the memory of Charlemagne had a particular regional and unique local tendency. Sulovsky’s focus in this chapter is on the Karlsdekret, a forgery pretending to be Charlemagne’s foundation charter for the city and convent of Aachen. Where historians previously dated it to before about 1147, Sulovsky affirms that the forged seal of Charlemagne, the Karlssiegel, which dates to the late 1120s, must have been impressed on the original copy of the forgery. Thus, the forgery was an imitation of an imperial charter, and it was designed to impress Lothar III in 1127. This small find redates and reshapes all of what we know about the rise of the cult of Charlemagne in crusade-era Europe. Aachen had a particular stake in shaping the memory of its most famous patron, but it also wielded an influence over it as it contained his tomb.

In the fourth chapter, Sulovsky turns to the supposedly imperial saints’ cults of the 1160s: the Three Kings and Saint Charlemagne. The chapter demonstrates that the cult of the Magi was unconnected to the emperor. Rather, the agency of Rainald of Dassel in bringing the Magi to Cologne was related to his personal suffering from the Milanese while he was imperial legate in their city on the eve of Epiphany (= Three Kings’ Day). As this was liturgically already the vigils of Epiphany, and as Rainald was trapped in the imperial palace next to the saintly bodies before he barely escaped, he translated the Magi to honour his protectors. This debunks the Kulturkampf-inspired theory that the purpose of worshipping the holy kings who adored Christ long before the apostles were called would help achieve a sacral independence of the Empire from the Papacy. On the other hand, the cult of Saint Charlemagne is shown to have been accepted at the imperial court as a part of a plan to mend the Alexandrine schism by launching an Anglo-Franco-German crusade, which was thought of as an imitation of Charlemagne’s exploits in the east.

The third chapter is divided into two sections – Frechulf of Lisieux’s Histories and Ado of Vienne’s Chronicon. Both men composed ambitious works, in which Frankish history played an ancillary role. In Frechulf, the Franks make a fleeting appearance in the final chapters of his Histories, which cut off unexpectedly in the seventh century. The motivations for this choice seemingly have more to do with Frechulf’s overarching structure of Christian history than with any judgement of the Merovingians. Frechulf was reticent on the subject of the Franks, to which he devoted less space than to other early medieval gentes. This is surprising, considering that Frechulf chose to end his Histories with the displacement of Romans and Goths by Franks and Lombards, signifying that they were important elements of his authorial program. The second section of the chapter focuses on Ado of Vienne’s Chronicon, arguing that Ado highlighted the discordant aspects of Merovingian history in the period 511–638. By doing so, Ado a presented a pessimistic appraisal of the entirety of the dynasty’s tenure, not only its so-called rois fainéants.