Age of Charlemagne

The Age of Charlemagne enters the discussion as both a dramatic setting and a test of historical credibility. The Canon of Toledo condemns plays that collapse distinct eras into implausible plots; Don Quixote, by contrast, treats the age as the authentic setting of celebrated chivalric adventures and appeals to material relics as proof.

A Chronology Under Criticism

The Canon of Toledo objects to plays that claim to take place in the time of King Pepin or Charlemagne but make Emperor Heraclius their central figure. Heraclius’s entry into Jerusalem with the cross and recovery of the Holy Sepulchre belong to a different historical period from those rulers, and the canon argues that such a mismatch violates dramatic truth. His example makes the Age of Charlemagne a marker against which theatrical chronology can be judged: a play may invent, but it should not mingle historical people and events so carelessly that its timeline becomes visibly incoherent.

The canon’s wider criticism concerns more than dates. He describes plays that leap between Europe, Asia, and Africa, and objects to the mixing of incidents from different people and periods without probability. In this argument, the Age of Charlemagne is not treated as an isolated topic of history; it is one point in a broader demand that drama respect sequence, place, and the relationships among events.

Don Quixote’s Counterclaim

Don Quixote answers the canon’s skepticism by insisting that the knights and adventures of romance belong to real history. He places the story of Princess Floripes and Guy of Burgundy, and that of Fierabras and the bridge of Mantible, in Charlemagne’s time. For him, denying these accounts would be as unreasonable as denying familiar figures and events from antiquity and legend.

His defense turns on objects presented as surviving evidence. He points to a pin in the king’s armoury, said to have guided Pierres’s wooden flying horse, and describes it as larger than a cart-pole. He also invokes Babieca’s saddle and Roland’s horn at Roncesvalles, the latter as large as a beam. These relics, in Don Quixote’s reasoning, connect the stories of famous knights to tangible things still visible in the world.

Competing Uses of the Past

The exchange sets two standards of historical plausibility against one another. The Canon of Toledo uses chronological separation to expose the absurdity of theatrical plots that combine incompatible periods. Don Quixote uses the apparent endurance of relics and the authority of remembered stories to make romance history. The same age thus functions both as a boundary that drama should not cross carelessly and as a setting that, in Don Quixote’s view, confirms the truth of knightly legend.

The contrast also sharpens the scene’s irony: Don Quixote’s evidence is concrete in form, but the conclusions he draws from it depend on accepting the romances he is defending. The text presents his certainty alongside the canon’s insistence on chronology, leaving the Age of Charlemagne at the meeting point of historical criticism and chivalric belief.