Presents Given and Presence Subverted: The Cunegunda Chormantel in Bamberg and the Ideology of Byzantine Textiles

Abstract

The cathedral treasury at Bamberg preserves a vestment known as the Chormantel of St. Cunegunda. Although the garment has undergone numerous modifications over the centuries, it partially preserves an early-eleventh-century textile with embroidered decoration and fragments of a Latin inscription. The embroidered images of seventy-two enthroned figures have traditionally been identified as portraits of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry II (r. 1002-24) and attributed to German embroiderers, but iconographic and technical characteristics of the embroideries argue against this identification. The attributes and costume of the enthroned figures are far more consistent with contemporary images of Byzantine emperors than they are with even the most Byzantinizing portraits of Ottonian rulers. Once identified as a Byzantine product, the embroidered textile takes its place in a larger pattern of imperial textile gifts, paralleled by a number of Byzantine woven silks with imperial images that survive in Western collections. While the exact circumstances surrounding the gift of the Chormantel to the German rulers are not known, textual sources clarify that such presents were intended to make the recipient a symbolic dependent of the Byzantine emperor through dress and title appropriate to a courtier. The recipients of the Chormantel textile effectively subverted the message of the gift by relabeling the images with embroidered inscriptions. Close attention to the structure and iconography of the object thus affords an insight into the Ottonians' grasp of Byzantine political ideology and their ability to use this knowledge to their advantage in their ongoing symbolic rivalry with Constantinople.

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