The Threaded Heart

This chapter focuses on Roll D of the Account-Inventory of Eudes of Nevers, considering what objects remained in Outremer and what returned to France. Unlike rolls B and C, which are not dated, Roll D notes that the accounts were made on September 15, 1266, thus over a month after Eudes’s death. It could be that the sales were made while Eudes was alive and the accounting finalized later, although that seems less likely. Rather, we are witness to the process of dissolving a baron’s material household, to the legal and financial resolutions at the end of a life. Two objects certainly returned to the West: Eudes’s heart and the parchment rolls studied in this book. In the days after his death, a surgeon and embalmer removed Eudes’s heart from his body. Then someone carried his heart, relic like, to Cîteaux. There, the monks placed Eudes’s heart into a tomb, joining his remains with those of his ancestors, the crusader dukes of Burgundy who had died before him.