Renaud de Montauban

Renaud de Montauban, known in French also as Renaut or Renault de Montauban, in Italian as Rinaldo di Montalbano, in Dutch as Reinout van Montalbaen, and in German as Reinold von Montalban, is a legendary knight of the medieval Matter of France rather than a person whose life can be confirmed from contemporary chronicles or archival records. He is the principal hero of the Old French chanson de geste commonly called Les Quatre Fils Aymon, which took shape in the twelfth century and was widely copied and recast in the thirteenth. In that tradition he is one of four brothers—Renaud, Allard, Guichard, and Richard—sons of Duke Aymon, a vassal placed by the poets in the Dordogne or the Ardennes in the legendary age of Charlemagne. The cycle turns on a blood feud with the emperor after Renaud kills a kinsman of Charlemagne (often named Bertolai) in a quarrel, in many recensions over a chess game. The brothers flee, receive supernatural aid from their cousin Maugis, a magician in the epic manner, and fortify the castle of Montauban. Renaud’s horse Bayard, able to carry all four brothers at once, and his sword Froberge became among the most recognizable properties of later European romance.

The war with Charlemagne occupies the greater part of the poem: sieges of Montauban, the brothers’ hunger and stubborn loyalty, Bayard’s famous leap over a great river (the Meuse or the Rhine according to the recension), and repeated attempts at reconciliation frustrated by the emperor’s wish to punish the killing and to seize the marvelous horse. Eventually a settlement is reached, often involving the surrender of Bayard, whom Charlemagne tries to drown; in many versions the horse survives and escapes into the forest. After peace is made, several French recensions send Renaud on a penitential journey to the Holy Land. On his return he takes work as a humble stonemason on a church in Cologne, traditionally identified with Saint Peter’s. Fellow workmen, jealous of his skill and industry, murder him and throw the body into the Rhine. The corpse is said to have been recovered by miraculous signs and to have become the focus of a local cult.

From the later Middle Ages this ending was fused with the veneration of Saint Reinold (Reinoldus) at Cologne and, more lastingly, at Dortmund, where the parish church of St. Reinoldi became a civic sanctuary and claimed relics of the martyr. Saint Reinold’s feast was kept on 7 January, and he was invoked as a patron of stonemasons. Medieval and early modern readers often treated the epic hero and the Cologne saint as one person; modern historians regard the identification as a legendary conflation rather than as a documented biography. No charter, annal, or other reliable historical source supplies a year of birth or death, a documented birthplace, or an independent life of Renaud. The Carolingian setting is a literary convention of the chansons de geste, not evidence that such a knight lived at Charlemagne’s court.

The story spread far beyond France. A Middle Dutch epic, Renout van Montalbaen, and German versions under the name Reinolt transmitted the four brothers and Bayard into the Low Countries and the Empire. In Italy, Rinaldo became a paladin in the prose compilations of Andrea da Barberino and then a central figure in Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, where he is cousin to Orlando (Roland) and a lover of Angelica. These Italian poems greatly expanded his amorous and chivalric adventures without adding historical fact. In the French chanson Renaud marries Clarisse (or Clarice), daughter of King Yon of Gascony, who had sheltered the brothers; later romances invent further liaisons and, in some branches, children. None of these family details can be verified outside fiction. Renaud was not a pope or a patriarch. There is no record of a formal papal canonization in the modern juridical sense; the cult attached to Saint Reinold grew from medieval popular and municipal devotion. Because the subject belongs to epic and hagiographical legend, precise dates, offices, and genealogies that would be required of a historical biography cannot be established and should not be invented.