A HISTORY OF HEART BURIALS: POPES, KINGS, SULTANS AND CHOPIN
The separation of the heart and the body can be traced to medieval court poetry in the 11th and 12th century, writes Immo Warntjes, a professor of medieval history in the book Death at Court. In some of the epic romances, the heart was a symbol of love, courage and “knightly noblesse,” and in some poems in the second half of the 12th century, the heart became an independent entity, leaving the body for the love interest of its owner. This literary idea that was “soon put into burial practice by those who listened to these stories at their courts,” Warntjes writes. But it was Robert of Arbrissel, a famous religious man in northwestern France who was believed to have had the first heart burial or “double burial” in the Middle Ages, in 1116, Warntjes notes. (There were instances of the heart being buried with entrails in the 11th century, but not the heart buried on its own.) Robert was a controversial reformer and preacher who founded the Abbey of Fontevraud in Anjou, France, in the early 12th century. He had the “aura of a saint” in his lifetime, and when he became ill while visiting a priory in Orsan, he made it known he wanted to be buried at the abbey he founded in Anjou. Unfortunately, Robert did not die in Anjou, and he was too popular for his own good, so his body became a musthave relic, and the secular and religious leaders of the two communities bickered over who would keep the body. Although there is debate in the literature, it appears that a compromise was reached, Warntjes writes. Robert’s body went to Fontevraud, his heart was to stay in Orsan. More heart burials followed: the heart of Pope Calixtus II was buried in an abbey in 1124, and when the archbishop of Dublin was buried in Normandy in 1180, his heart came back to the Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin 50 years later, Estella Weiss-Krejci notes in a chapter on heart burial in the 2010 book Body Parts and Bodies Whole. Nearly a century after Robert of Arbrissel’s death, secular rulers like Richard the Lionheart followed the trend, possibly encouraged by their court literature and poetry. Weiss-Krejci, a researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, who specializes in mortuary archeology, defines heart burial as burying the heart away from the corpse, in a separate location, without any other internal organs. “Processing the corpse” goes back to prehistoric times, she notes, with different traditions developing around the world. Evisceration, or the removal of intestines, had been a practical way to keep the body of a prominent person in better shape for transportation and lying-in-state rituals, and in Europe, the practice dated back to the 8th and 9th centuries, but became standard in the Holy Roman Empire between the 10th and 11th centuries. Heart removal, which is difficult to do with the placement of the ribs and the diaphragm, was not a necessary part of that process. Heart burial was more symbolic: a way to show love, entrench a belief system, a way to show loyalty to more than one place. Heart burial was by no means a common occurrence. But it became more popular during the Catholic Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries. By the middle of the 17th century, heart burial had also become a symbol of “devotion to the Virgin Mary,” and it had become a good compromise among competing religious orders. When Habsburg Empress Claudia Felicitas died in 1676, she had planned to be buried beside her mother (who was still alive) at a Dominican order, but “the Capuchin monks who felt deprived of her body demanded her heart,” WeissKrejci writes. Although many famous Catholics were associated with heart burial, it was not an exclusive Catholic tradition, she notes. The wife of Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus (who died in 1632), a Protestant, kept her husband’s heart for a time, but later buried it with the body. The heart of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, was allegedly buried separately when he died in 1566. English poet Thomas Hardy, who wasn’t very religious, had his heart buried in a Dorset churchyard, while his ashes went to Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. It wasn’t his choice — it had been a compromise after his 1928 death between competing interests. One of the most famous contemporary heart burials was that of Frédéric Chopin. Chopin requested in his will that his heart be returned to his homeland in present-day Poland when he died in France in 1849. His older sister smuggled his heart back to Poland in 1850 inside a crystal jar of what was believed to be cognac, which had been used since the French Revolution for tissue preservation, according to one study. After many “historic perturbations,” the study notes, the heart has been entombed at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Warsaw since 1945, with a stone engraved with a biblical quote: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” The jar was exhumed in 2014 by a team of Polish scientists who wanted to know if Chopin died from tuberculosis, as had long been thought, or cystic fibrosis, as later theories suggested. They did not remove the heart from the jar, but noted that it was “massively enlarged,” floppy, and had a frosted white appearance, with several lesions, according to their study. They concluded, based on its appearance, that he likely died from tuberculosis complications. By the time of Chopin’s death in the 19th century, heart burials were losing their appeal, considered by some to be old-fashioned and barbaric, WeissKrejci notes, although the practice had a sporadic revival in the early 20th century. In Toronto, representatives from the Catholic Archdiocese, Mount Pleasant Group and St. James Cemetery said they do not have any records of heart burials at their sites.