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Rock crystal depicting Susanna and the Elders, probably made in Germany
AD 855–869
Royal divorces generally mean political trouble. The marital problems of Henry VIII plunged England into decades of religious strife, and when Edward VIII wanted to marry a divorced woman it caused a constitutional crisis that cost him his throne. This object is associated with a king whose protracted attempts to divorce his queen were intended to safeguard the kingdom. His failure to do so probably killed him, and it certainly led to the termination not only of his line but of his kingdom as well. The object, an engraved rock crystal, tells us his name. Written in Latin, the inscription reads: ‘Lothair, king of the Franks, caused me to be made’.
The Lothair Crystal, also known as the Susanna Crystal, is a flat disc of rock crystal about 18 centimetres (7 inches) in diameter, and carved into it is a biblical (or in some traditions an apocryphal) story in eight separate scenes, like a crystal cartoon strip. It is a story based in Babylon, where the beautiful young Susanna is the wife of a rich merchant. While she is bathing in her husband’s orchard, two older men intrude and try to bully her into having sex with them. She calls her servants for help, and the furious elders falsely claim that they saw her in the act of adultery. We then see Susanna being led away to almost certain death by stoning, but at that point the brilliant young prophet Daniel intervenes and challenges the evidence for her conviction. Separating the elders, Daniel asks each of them one searching question in a classic courtroom drama: under what kind of tree did they see Susanna having sex? The men give conflicting answers, their story is exposed as fabricated, and it is they who are stoned to death, for perjury. In the final scene Susanna is declared innocent and gives thanks to God. I asked Lord Bingham, former Lord Chief Justice and Senior Law Lord, to give us a lawyer’s perspective on the story:
Daniel did what Rumpole of the Old Bailey would do if he thought he was cross-examining witnesses who were telling lies. In real life Daniel would have been extremely lucky to have been thought to have demolished the witnesses and to demonstrate their dishonesty by asking them one question each, but the principle is quite clear, and Daniel was clearly a very skilful cross-examiner.
Each scene on the crystal is a masterpiece of miniature carving, and in every scene the artist has also found space for a small text in Latin, explaining what is going on. In the final scene is the ringing phrase Et salvatus est sanguis innoxius in die illa – ‘And that day, innocent blood was saved’. It’s around this scene that we find the text naming King Lothair.
The king who commissioned the Susanna Crystal was descended from one of the great figures of medieval Europe – Charlemagne. Around the year 800, Charlemagne, King of the Franks, had created an empire that covered most of western Europe, including northern Italy, western Germany and modern France. It was the largest state western Europe had seen since the fall of Rome, and the stability and prosperity of Charlemagne’s empire allowed a great flourishing of the arts in the years that followed. Our crystal is a magnificent example of this so-called ‘Carolingian Renaissance’.
It is a jewel that has almost always been valued. For most of its existence it was in the abbey of Waulsort, in modern Belgium, in the centre of Charlemagne’s empire. It was certainly there in the twelfth century, when the abbey’s chronicle clearly describes it:
This desirable treasure was made … at the request of the famed Lothair, King of the Franks. A beryl stone placed in the middle contains a depiction of how in Daniel, Susanna was evilly condemned by the old judges. [The stone] shows the skill of its art by the variety of its work.
It probably remained at Waulsort until French revolutionary troops looted the abbey in the 1790s. Perhaps it was they who threw the crystal – clearly made for royalty, which they despised – into the nearby River Meuse. When it was found it was cracked, but otherwise completely undamaged, because rock crystal is astonishingly tough. It is very hard and cannot be chiselled, but must be ground with abrasive powders. The whole thing would have taken an immense amount of time and great skill to work, which is why crystals like this one were such luxury objects. We don’t know what the original purpose of our Susanna Crystal was – possibly an offering to a shrine – but it was in every sense an object fit for a king.
By the time the crystal was made, Charlemagne’s empire had broken down, and the whole of north-west Europe was divided among three members of his squabbling and profoundly dysfunctional family. The squabbles ultimately resulted in the empire splitting into three parts: an eastern kingdom that would later become Germany, a western kingdom that would become France, and Lothair’s ‘Middle Kingdom’, called Lotharingia, which ran from modern Belgium down through Provence into Italy. This Middle Kingdom was always the weakest of the three, forever threatened by wicked uncles on either side. Lotharingia needed to be able to defend itself: it needed a strong king.
Rosamond McKitterick, Professor of Medieval History at Cambridge University, sets the scene:
We know almost nothing about the court of Lothair the Second, simply because most of our sources devoted to him are in two particular categories. One is made up of narrative sources describing the vulnerability of his own little kingdom in the middle of the west and the east Frankish kingdoms, where his uncles, Charles the Bald in the west and Louis the German in the east, were casting their greedy eyes upon his kingdom. The other category is much more pertinent to this crystal, because it concerns the attempts Lothair made to get rid of his wife, Theutberga. He seems to have married her very soon after he inherited the throne, even though he had a long-standing mistress called Waldrada, from whom he had a son and a daughter. When he married Theutberga, she had no children and she continued to bear no children. Lothair seems to have decided Waldrada would be a better bet. So he recruited his two bishops, of Cologne and Trier, to have the marriage annulled on the grounds of Theutberga’s incest with her brother.
Lothair’s bid to divorce his wife and marry his mistress was no self-indulgent whim: he needed to have a legitimate heir, which was his only chance to preserve his inheritance and his kingdom. But royal divorce, then as now, was political dynamite.
The final scenes of the crystal show the elders being stoned to death and Susannah declared innocent
The bishops of Cologne and Trier had actually obtained confessions from the queen, possibly through torture, that she had committed incest with her brother. But Theutberga appealed to the Pope, who investigated the case and declared her innocent. This was a huge dynastic setback for Lothair, but he seems to have accepted the Pope’s decision. Although he continued to try to find another way of divorcing her, he seems to have acknowledged publicly that the claims against Theutberga were groundless and that the slandered woman was entirely innocent.
Because of the strong parallels with the Susanna story, it’s always been tempting to see the crystal as connected to this royal drama. Perhaps it was made as a present for Theutberga to show Lothair’s sincerity in accepting that she was blameless – if so, it’s a kind of private statement marking a temporary truce in their marital hostilities. But aspects of the way in which the final scene is treated hint that it is almost certainly something much more significant. In the last scene, the artist deviates from the biblical text and shows Susanna being declared innocent by a king sitting in judgement, and the inscription specifically names Lothair. The message is clear: one of the key duties of the king is to ensure that justice is done – in short, the king must secure and respect the rule of law, even at great personal cost to himself. Justice is almost the defining royal virtue.
A treatise, probably written for Lothair himself, spells this out:
The just and peaceful king carefully thinks about each case, and not despising the sick and poor of his people, speaks just judgements, putting down the wicked and raising the good.
These ideals, articulated more than a thousand years ago, are still central to European political life today. Lord Bingham told me:
In the centre of the crystal, one sees the king who commissioned it in the role of judge. This is of considerable interest and importance because historically the crown and monarchy has always been regarded as the fount of justice. When Queen Elizabeth II took her Coronation Oath in 1953 she swore a very old oath, prescribed by an Act of 1688, that she would do justice and mercy in all her judgements. This is exactly the role in which one sees King Lothair – in the role of actually personally administering justice, which, of course, the Queen no longer does, but the judges who do it in her name are very proud to be called Her Majesty’s judges.
The Susanna Crystal was made for a king without an heir in a kingdom without a future. In 869, when Lothair died undivorced, his uncles did indeed partition his lands, and all that remains of Lotharingia today is the name of Lorraine. For more than a thousand years, indeed until 1945, Lothair’s Middle Kingdom was bitterly fought over by the successors of the wicked uncles, France and Germany. If Lothair had succeeded in divorcing his wife, and had had a legitimate heir, Lorraine might now rank with Spain, France and Germany as one of the great states of continental Europe. Lotharingia perished, but the principle that Lothair’s Crystal proclaims has survived: a central duty of the ruler of the state is to guarantee that justice is done, dispassionately and in open court. Innocence must be protected. The Lothair Crystal is one of the first European images of the notion of the rule of law.