The Amorous Heart Read online

  Even more macabre, a wooden casket made in Basel around 1430 depicts a lady grating her lover’s heart into a mortar. The most horrific example is certainly the woodcut made by Casper von Regensburg around 1480. It shows the hearts of nineteen victims of Frau Minne, squeezed, pierced, broken, burned, sliced in half, and sadistically tortured. If this gruesome picture doesn’t frighten away the would-be lover, nothing will.

  We are now in a position to answer some of the questions posed in the introduction to this book. When the bi-lobed figure we now call a heart first appeared some twenty-five hundred years ago, it was merely a decorative item with no meaning at all. Indeed, it probably evolved from the shapes found in nature, such as leaves and flowers, and acted as pure embellishment. Certainly the examples found in ancient Persian art and even those in the Spanish Beatus manuscripts do not claim to represent love.

  Yet during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries this decorative shape acquired a meaning: it came to signify love. The first hearts symbolizing love were shaped like pinecones, eggplants, or pears. These “heart offerings,” intended for another person in The Romance of the Pear, circa 1250, and for God in Giotto’s Caritas, circa 1300, expressed the meaning of the heart as love but did not yet contain its iconic form. That form evolved in the first decades of the fourteenth century from images in Barberino’s Documenti, Giotto’s Chastity fresco, and Niccolò di Ser Sozzo’s Assumption of the Virgin before assuming its definitive shape during the 1340s in The Romance of Alexander. Italian, French, and Flemish painters can all take credit for the invention of the bi-lobed, symmetrical heart.

  Symbols were so common to the medieval mentality that people were expected to recognize their meaning without explanation or definition. For lay people the heart simply meant love. It represented the overwrought feelings that lovers experience—feelings that can be satisfied only when two hearts merge as one, metaphorically speaking. For members of the clergy, the heart was understood as a meeting place between God and man. God sent His message of love directly into a person’s heart, where it might—or might not—be fully embraced.

  But symbols have a way of slipping out of their envelopes and assuming meanings and uses that were never anticipated. In the fifteenth century the heart showed up in a number of unusual places, such as the facade of a townhouse in Bourges built by the ultra-rich French minister of finance, Jacques Coeur (1395–1456). The pictogram that spoke his name—Coeur (heart)—was also incorporated into his personal coat of arms, following a European practice that had been around since 1194, when King Knut (Canute) VI placed nine hearts and three lions on the Danish seal.

  When playing cards first appeared in the fifteenth century the heart icon was assigned to represent one of the suits. Initially, as there was no uniform pan-European system, the number and type of suits varied from country to country. The Anglophone world got its four suits—spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs—from the French. Later in the century the Germans also settled on four suits, one of which was hearts; the others were acorns, leaves, and bells. The red heart carries undertones of love, whereas the black spade, derived from the Italian word spada, meaning “sword,” suggests tragedy and death. For most of us such cultural associations linger long in the psyche.

  And surely the English nursery rhyme known as “The Queen of Hearts” is about love, though in such coded form that a child of four wouldn’t understand its meaning.

  The Queen of Hearts,

  She made some tarts,

  All on a summer’s day;

  The Knave of Hearts,

  He stole the tarts,

  And took them clean away.

  The King of Hearts

  Called for the tarts,

  And beat the Knave full sore;

  The Knave of Hearts

  Brought back the tarts,

  And vowed he’d steal no more.

  I suspect that the rhyme originated in tales of adultery inspired by such legendary characters as Lancelot, Guinevere, and King Arthur. The husband, his attractive wife, and her lover have formed an archetypal trio in the Western world for a very long time, beginning with the Greco-Roman gods—Mars, Venus, and Vulcan.

  Once launched in the Middle Ages as love’s representative, the heart has maintained its iconic shape and status as the preeminent symbol of amorous love, despite other meanings and uses that have glommed on to it since then.

  Chapter 9

  A Separate Burial for the Heart

  MANY YEARS AGO I VISITED THE FRENCH ABBEY OF FONTEVRAUD near Angers to see the burial site of Eleanor of Aquitaine. A recumbent statue of the queen, with an open book in her hands, is stretched out on top of her tomb. Next to her there is another tomb containing the bodies of her second husband, Henry II of England, and their son, Richard I, better known as Richard the Lionheart. It was a moving experience to see the resting place of those three famed personages, sorely divided in life and brought together in death, but I was surprised to learn that Richard’s heart is not with the rest of his body at Fontevraud. When he died in France in 1199 his heart was embalmed with herbs and spices, wrapped in linen, placed in a leaden box, and given a separate burial inside the Cathedral of Rouen, 300 kilometers away.

  The cities of Rouen in Normandy and Angers in Anjou had special meaning for the English. Richard I was officially the Duke of Normandy and the Count of Anjou as well as the King of England. After his childhood in England he spent most of his adult life either in his mother’s homeland, Aquitaine in southern France, or on crusades to the Holy Land. The placement of Richard’s heart in Normandy and his body in Anjou suggested not only an emotional attachment to French civilization but also English claims to these territories that would not be resolved until the end of the Hundred Years’ War in the fifteenth century.

  The discovery that Richard’s heart had been buried apart from his body led me into a fascinating investigation of this practice. Why was the heart considered so special as to merit separate burial? Why not the brain or the liver? Had there been precedents for this procedure before the Middle Ages?

  Indeed, there had been, stretching back four thousand years to the ancient Egyptians. While they preserved the deceased person’s viscera in four canopic jars—one each for the stomach, intestines, lungs, and liver—the heart was treated with a reverence not accorded the other organs. It was removed from the body, mummified, and then returned to the chest so as to be present at the time of judgment and bear witness for the deceased.

  During the lifetime of Richard the Lionheart the procedure of extracting the heart and giving it a separate burial was rare, though a precedent for interring his heart at the Cathedral of Rouen had been set by his royal ancestor, Henry I, in 1135. Henry’s heart, along with his eyes, bowels, and tongue, were left behind in Rouen when most of his body was carried back to England for burial at Reading Abbey.

  It is not surprising that the practice of burying the heart separately became more frequent during the Crusades; if a crusader died far from home, his body would deteriorate during the long voyage back to Europe, whereas an embalmed heart could be returned intact to the ancestral vault.

  During the thirteenth century such split burials for both Englishmen and Frenchmen of the highest ranks became common. The first woman to be so honored was Blanche de Castille, the mother of King Louis IX, better known as Saint Louis. Her heart was in interred in the Abbaye du Lys (Abbey of the Lily) in 1252, and her body in the Maubuisson Abbey, a Cistercian nunnery she had founded in the suburbs of Paris.

  Three decades later the heart of Blanche’s younger son, Charles d’Anjou, was placed in the Dominican convent on the rue Saint-Jacques in Paris, while the rest of his body was interred in the Cathedral of Saint Denis, the traditional resting place for French royalty. A recumbent statue of Charles was laid out on top of the heart sepulcher, with Charles portrayed holding his heart in his left hand over his chest.

  In that same year, 1285, the heart of King Philippe III (“the Bold”) was extracted from
his body and buried at the same Dominican convent in Paris chosen for the heart of his uncle, Charles d’Anjou. Philippe III was the first French king whose heart was placed all alone in a separate sepulcher. But not the last. In December 1314 the heart of his son, Philippe IV, called “the Fair,” was buried separately in the church of Saint-Louis de Poissy.

  From this period to the seventeenth century, French kings and queens were routinely given two burial sites, one for the heart and another, usually Saint Denis, for the rest of the body. King Charles V prepared well in advance for the day in 1380 when his heart would be lifted out of his body and placed in the Cathedral of Rouen. He commissioned a sepulcher for his heart from the sculptor Jean de Liège, who began to work on it years before the king’s death. Though the tomb has since disappeared, drawings show that the sculpture of the king on top of the tomb portrayed him with a scepter in one hand and his heart in the other.

  Some notable royal figures resisted the practice. Queen Isabeau de Bavière (d. 1435) stated explicitly in her testament of 1431 that she did not want her heart removed from her body. Neither King Charles VII (d. 1461) nor King Louis XII (d. 1515) had two burial sites. Louis XII wished to make it quite clear that his full body was interred at Saint Denis, heart and all. His epitaph read, “Here lies the body with the heart of the very high, very excellent, very powerful prince Louis XII King of France.”

  Those who continued the practice sometimes went to great expense and ceremony to ensure that their hearts would become objects of special veneration, like the relics of saints. Thus, René d’Anjou (d. 1480), the cousin of King Charles VII, insisted in his testament that the funeral ceremony for his heart should be as elaborate as the one for his body. His heart was carried to the Franciscan church of the Minor Brothers in Angers by a large procession drawn from both the religious and lay population as well as fifty poor men dressed in black, whose presence had been stipulated in René’s will. His heart was enclosed in a silver box and carried by four distinguished men with university degrees. Once they were all inside the church a mass was held in honor of the deceased, and the heart was placed in a niche carved into one of the chapel walls. (We will encounter René’s unique contributions to the literature of the heart in the following chapter.)

  Heart tombs became more and more elaborate. The heart sepulcher for King Charles VIII (d. 1498) in the church of Notre-Dame de Cléry was itself shaped in the form of the by-then common heart symbol. And to make certain that viewers understood who and what was inside, the lid on the top of the leaden box containing his heart carried the inscription: “This is the heart of King Charles the Eighth.”

  His wife, Anne de Bretagne (d. 1514), also had a magnificent heart sepulcher. Her story demonstrates why royalty perpetuated the practice of housing the heart in a separate site. Through her marriage to Charles VIII Anne had united the independent duchy of Brittany with the crown of France. She remained duchess of Brittany as well as queen of France during her marriage to Charles VIII and then, after his death in 1498, held on to those positions through her second marriage to Louis XII. By placing her heart in the tomb of her parents at the convent of the Carmelites in Nantes, Anne signaled her emotional attachment to her progenitors as well as her great geographical gift to France. It was an eminently political act, affirming Anne’s rule over her Breton subjects, which would presumably be passed on to her descendants.

  Though the body of Anne de Bretagne was eventually interred with that of her second husband, Louis XII, in the most grandiose tomb ever built in Saint Denis, her heart belonged to Brittany. The epitaph on top of her heart sepulcher exalted her personal virtues and her significant place in French history: “In this little vessel / of pure gold reposes a great heart… Anne was her name. In France two times the queen. Duchess of the Bretons, royal and sovereign.”

  Here and elsewhere both political and affective reasons entered into the decision to honor the royal heart with a separate tomb. Buried apart, the semimystical heart inspired reverence and commanded loyalty to one’s deceased sovereign.

  THE POPULAR KING OF FRANCE HENRY IV WAS KILLED BY A Catholic fanatic on May 14, 1610. He had expressed the desire for his heart to be brought to the Jesuit collège of La Flèche and kept there, along with that of his wife, when she died. One of the students at La Flèche was none other than the future philosopher René Descartes, who spent several days in prayer with the other students after they heard the tragic news and before the king’s heart was laid to rest. One wonders whether this dramatic event had some influence on the attention Descartes gave to the heart in his philosophical work (to be discussed in Chapter 14).

  The treatment of the heart and body of the mighty King Louis XIV makes for macabre history. Immediately after his death in 1715 doctors from the Faculty of Medicine began an autopsy with the removal of his heart and entrails. The heart was embalmed and sent in a golden reliquary to be hung in the Jesuit Church of Paris, while the entrails were dispatched to the Cathedral of Notre Dame. A few nights later the rest of his body was transported in a torch-lit procession to the Cathedral of Saint Denis.

  Unfortunately Louis XIV’s heart, entrails, and body all suffered ignominious fates during the French Revolution. In 1793 his body and those of other French kings were disinterred from Saint Denis and thrown into a common grave. His entrails were also gotten rid of. And the heart? That was sold to an artist, to be ground up and used as mumia for paint.

  PERHAPS THE MOST BIZARRE TREATMENT OF A ROYAL BODY involved King James II of England. After he was deposed during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, he fled to France, where he lived as Louis XIV’s honored guest. When he died in 1701 James’s son brought his father’s heart to the convent of the Visitandine nuns on the Chaillot hill in Paris. The convent had been founded in 1651 by James II’s mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, who had also lived in exile in France and whose heart had already been placed in the convent. Today the Palais de Chaillot stands on the site.

  Other parts of James’s body were distributed elsewhere: his brain in a lead casket was sent to the Scots College in Paris, his entrails were placed in two gilt urns and sent to the parish church of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and the English Jesuit college at Saint-Omer, and the flesh from his right arm was given to the English Augustinian nuns of Paris. What was left of his body was buried in the chapel of the English Benedictines on the rue Saint-Jacques. All of James’s remains were destroyed during the French Revolution except parts of his bowel, rediscovered during the nineteenth century in the church of Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

  WHILE THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH LED THE WAY IN BURYING royal hearts separately from the body, the House of Habsburg in Austria followed suit in the seventeenth century, beginning with the heart of Archduke Ferdinand IV in 1654 and ending with the heart of Archduke Franz Karl in 1878. There are fifty-four Habsburg hearts enclosed within copper urns and housed in Vienna’s Augustiner Church, which is situated inside the palace courtyard. Visible through a window in an iron door, these royal hearts have made lasting impressions upon generations of Viennese children brought there to honor the monarchy. In recent years they have become a tourist destination.

  In 2011 Otto von Habsburg, the last heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had his heart buried separately from his body. He chose the Benedictine Abbey in Pannonhalma, Hungary, as a gesture of affection for the country that was once a major part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. One hundred members of the House of Habsburg, representatives of the Hungarian government, and various clergymen from the Catholic, Lutheran, and Jewish religions attended the ceremony, with vespers in Latin and ecumenical prayers. The rest of Otto von Habsburg was buried in Vienna.

  ALTHOUGH THE PRACTICE OF SEPARATE BURIALS FOR THE heart is best known in conjunction with royalty and nobility, it was practiced, though much less frequently, among clergymen. When Lawrence O’Toole, the second archbishop of Dublin, died in 1180, his heart was sent to Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral. It remained there in a heart-shaped wooden box within an iro
n cage until 2012, when it disappeared. No one has yet recovered the heart of this Irish saint, and the theft remains a mystery.

  From the late Middle Ages onward the prince-bishops of Würzburg in Germany were buried in three parts: their corpses in the Würzburg Cathedral, their intestines in the Marienberg castle church, and their hearts in what is now Ebrach Abbey.

  Popes, too, followed the practice, from Sixtus V in 1590 to Leo XIII in 1903. Twenty-two papal hearts are buried in marble urns at Santi Vincenzo e Anastasio a Trevi in Rome, a baroque church directly across from the considerably more famous Trevi Fountain.

  UNDER THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE SOME MULTIPLE BURIALS for high-status individuals may also have taken place. Recently investigators descended on a small city in southern Hungary called Szigetvar, where the heart of Suleiman the Magnificent is believed to have been buried.

  According to legend Suleiman died at this site while fifty thousand of his Ottoman soldiers sacked a nearby fortress defended by twenty-five hundred Croatian-Hungarian Christians. Suleiman’s death was kept secret until after the battle. Then his heart and other vital organs were buried in Hungary, and his body was carried back to Istanbul. Excavations have uncovered a sixteenth-century memorial in the form of a brick mosque, a dervish cloister, and the turbe, or tomb, where the sultan’s heart and entrails are thought to have been interred. Those structures stood until 1692, when the Hapsburgs conquered the region and carried anything of value back to Vienna. It is believed that some artifacts left behind, including Suleiman’s heart, were then reburied by local farmers.

  Regardless of whether the sultan’s heart still remains at this site, an invitation has been extended from the city of Szigetvar to the presidents of Turkey, Croatia, and Hungary to help further the search for it.