Heart Burial

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A small lead box came out of the floor of Rouen cathedral in 1838, lifted during excavations near a worn royal effigy by the local antiquary Achille Deville. Inside was a brown powder, all that remained of a heart, and a Latin line that named its owner: the heart of Richard, King of the English. The body of that king lay in another country, in the abbey of Fontevraud beside his father; his entrails lay in a third place, at Chalus, where the crossbow bolt had found him in 1199. One man, three graves. The lead casket at Rouen is the most famous survivor of a custom that ran, for roughly five centuries, through the churches and abbeys of Europe: the burial of the heart apart from the body.

The tomb effigy of Richard I at Fontevraud Abbey, where his body was buried; his heart was interred separately at Rouen and his entrails at Chalus. — Photograph by AYArktos, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Heart burial is the interment of a person’s heart separately from the rest of the corpse, in a different place and usually a different tomb. It belonged mainly to the European elite of the Middle Ages — kings and queens, dukes and counts, bishops and abbots — the classes who could command surgeons, embalmers, lead caskets, and the prayers of more than one religious house. It flourished from roughly the twelfth century into the seventeenth, with isolated survivals long after. The heart was the favored organ, but it rarely traveled alone; the entrails, the viscera as a whole, were commonly removed in the same operation and buried at a fourth site or returned with the heart. What made the heart special was less a settled doctrine than a convergence of the practical, the dynastic, and the pious upon a single portable, emblematic part.

The operation

The mechanics were frankly surgical, and they were dictated by a hard fact: a corpse will not keep. A great person who died far from the chosen place of burial — on crusade, on campaign, on pilgrimage, in a distant capital — could not simply be carried home over weeks of summer travel. Something had to be done to the body soon after death.

Three solutions competed. The first was Mediterranean embalming: the corpse opened, the organs removed, the cavity packed with aromatics and the whole desiccated for transport. The second was the so-called mos Teutonicus, the “Germanic custom,” a name coined by the early-thirteenth-century Bolognese rhetorician Boncompagno da Signa to mark off a northern practice from southern embalming. Under the mos Teutonicus the body was dismembered and the parts boiled — in water, wine, or vinegar — until the flesh fell from the bones; the flesh was buried where the person died, and the clean, light, durable bones were packed, often in spice, and carried home. When the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa drowned in the Saleph river in 1190 on the Third Crusade, his flesh was boiled away at Antioch and his bones were meant to go on to Jerusalem. The third solution was the one that concerns us: removal of the heart and viscera, their embalming and division, and their burial in separate honored places while the body went to its own tomb, with the rites of Christian burial repeated at each.

The procedure was consistent across the cases that the record preserves. The corpse was opened soon after death. The heart was excised; the viscera were drawn out. The parts were washed, treated with preservatives and aromatics, wrapped — Richard’s heart was wrapped in linen — and sealed in a small casket of lead, or of silver or other precious metal for those who could afford it. These sealed parts could then go where the whole body could not: by ship, by packhorse, across borders, to the ancestral foundation or the favored shrine.

What that treatment actually involved came partly into view in 2013, when a team led by the forensic pathologist Philippe Charlier published a biological analysis of Richard the Lionheart’s heart in Scientific Reports. The powder yielded pollen and plant traces — myrtle, daisy, mint — alongside frankincense, creosote, mercury, and probably lime. The mixture served two ends at once. Some of it, the mercury and the tarry creosote, worked against decay; the rest, the incense and sweet herbs, gave the heart a fragrance. The choice was not arbitrary. Frankincense recalled the gifts of the Magi, and the sweet smell answered to the medieval idea of the odor of sanctity, the fragrance that holy bodies were held to give off. A king’s heart was being preserved, and it was being prepared to smell like a relic.

The economy of the soul

Why divide a person at all? The recorded reasons are several, and in most cases they ran together rather than singly.

The plainest was transport. A crusader or a noble who died in the Holy Land or on the road could not be brought home entire, but the heart could be sent back to the family abbey while the body was buried where it fell. The logistics of the Crusades drove the practice hard; partible remains were a solution to the problem of dying far away, and the heart was the smallest, most meaningful unit into which a person could be reduced and still be honored.

A second reason was the multiplication of tombs, and with it the multiplication of prayer. To divide the remains was to give two or three religious houses a share of a great patron — and a share of the prestige, the pilgrim traffic, the endowments, and above all the prayers that a notable burial drew. This is the logic that links heart burial to the deepest current of medieval Christian death: the conviction, central to the doctrine of purgatory, that the dead were not beyond help. The souls of the departed could be eased, their time of purgation shortened, by the Masses and intercessions of the living. A heart laid near a saint’s relics, or under the floor of a church the donor had built and endowed, was a heart positioned to draw on the prayer offered there in perpetuity. Dividing the body among foundations was, among other things, a way of buying into several streams of intercession at once. The whole machinery belongs to the medieval economy of the soul, in which the fate of the dead in the long reckoning to come depended on the unbroken attention of the living.

A third reason was simple devotion: the wish to lie, even in part, in a particular beloved place. Robert the Bruce, dying in 1329, asked that his heart be carried on crusade to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, a vow he had not lived to keep in person; Sir James Douglas bore the embalmed heart toward the Holy Land, fell in battle in Spain, and the heart came back to be buried at Melrose Abbey. The gesture fused all three motives — the unreachable holy place, the honored Scottish house, and the personal longing of a king who wanted his heart to finish a journey his body could not.

What the heart was, and was not

It is worth marking the difference between what the practitioners are recorded as intending and what the heart, as a symbol, might be thought to mean. The surviving wills and tomb inscriptions speak overwhelmingly of prayer, of remembrance, of proximity to relics and to kin. They are practical and pious documents. The heart in them is a token to be placed well, not usually a philosophical statement about where the self resides.

The temptation, for a later reader, is to assume the heart was chosen because it was felt to be the seat of the person — the organ of love, courage, and will, as much of medieval thought did hold it to be. The metaphor was certainly available, and the choice of the heart over, say, the liver is hardly accidental. But the historians who have studied the custom most closely, Charles Angell Bradford in his 1933 survey and Elizabeth A. R. Brown in her 1981 study of the legislation, both caution against reading too much metaphysics into a habit whose documented reasons are largely logistical and devotional. The “seat of the person” reading is easy to state and hard to prove from the sources; the heart’s symbolic weight hovers over the practice without often being named in it. Bradford, reaching further back, set the custom against the older instinct that produced the canopic jars of Egypt, where the viscera were preserved apart from the embalmed body — a comparison that suggests how old and how wide the impulse to honor the parts of the dead separately runs.

This is the place to keep two adjacent things distinct. The heart-as-relic of heart burial is not the Sacred Heart of later Catholic piety — the devotion to the physical heart of Christ as the visible sign of his love, which grew up on its own track. The shared word and the shared organ make for a contrast worth drawing, but heart burial is a funerary rite for the dead of this world, not a devotion directed at the divine.

The Church divided

The Church’s attitude was unsettled, and for a coherent reason. Christian hope rested on the resurrection of the body — the belief that at the last the dead would be raised whole and entire. A practice that opened, boiled, and scattered the corpse sat uneasily beside that hope, and it troubled theologians who saw in dismemberment an affront to the body that God would one day reassemble.

The reaction came at the end of the thirteenth century. On 27 September 1299 Pope Boniface VIII issued the decretal Detestande feritatis, also known by its opening on burials, condemning as a detestable savagery the eviscerating, dismembering, and boiling of corpses to carry the bones home. The bull threatened excommunication and ordered that those who died abroad be buried, at least provisionally, near the place of death. Brown’s study of this legislation shows both its target and its limits. Boniface’s stated ground was that such division had no precedent among the Fathers of the Church or in the burial of Christ himself — though the objection sat awkwardly beside the Church’s own thriving cult of relics, in which the divided bodies of the saints were venerated piece by piece across Christendom.

The bull did not end the custom. It bit hardest on the boiling of the mos Teutonicus; the cleaner excision and embalming of the heart was easier to defend and went on. Powerful families secured dispensations, and within half a century the legislation had been relaxed — Pope Clement VI, around the mid-fourteenth century, granted permissions that effectively reopened the door. What the episode registers is a genuine tension, never fully resolved in this period, between an entrenched aristocratic funerary habit and a doctrine of bodily wholeness; the dispensation, not the prohibition, was the lasting outcome.

The long afterlife

The custom outlasted the Middle Ages and acquired, in the early modern centuries, its most systematic form. The House of Habsburg made of it a dynastic rite. From the death of Ferdinand IV in 1654, the bodies of the Austrian Habsburgs were divided three ways and laid in three Viennese churches: the body in the Imperial Crypt under the Capuchin church, the entrails in the Ducal Crypt beneath St. Stephen’s cathedral, and the heart, in a silver urn, in the Herzgruft — the Heart Crypt — behind the Loreto chapel of the Augustinian church. Fifty-four such urns were eventually ranged there, the last placed in 1878. Richard’s accidental three-fold distribution had become, half a millennium on, a deliberate and repeated imperial geometry: one ruler, three crypts, three claims staked in sacred ground.

The Herzgruft (Heart Crypt) behind the Loreto chapel of the Augustinian Church in Vienna, where the silver urns holding Habsburg hearts were ranged; depicted in 1872. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Changing funerary sensibilities thinned the practice through the eighteenth century, and what survived afterward did so as personal sentiment rather than settled rite. When Frédéric Chopin died in Paris in 1849, his body went to Père Lachaise, but his heart — by his own wish, and carried home by his sister in a jar of cognac — was sealed inside a pillar of the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw, under an inscription, returning the composer to the Poland he had left. The gesture is recognizably the same as Robert the Bruce’s, stripped of crusade and dynasty: the heart sent where the person most wished to be.

The pillar in the Church of the Holy Cross, Warsaw, into which Frederic Chopin’s heart was sealed, beneath a commemorative inscription. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Its physical traces remain scattered through the churches of Europe — small lead and silver caskets, separate effigies, urns ranged in their own crypts, and inscriptions that name the heart of someone whose body lies, sometimes, hundreds of miles away.

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