Turpin. Archbishop of Rheims, friend and companion of Charlemagne, the supposititious author of the Historia Karoli Magni et Rotholandi. According to Gaston Paris, this falls into two parts: the first (c. 1050) dealing in five chapters with Charlemagne's conquest of Spain without reference to Roland; the second (early in 12th century) giving the legend of Roland, the treachery of Ganelon, Roland's heroic death at Roncevaux, and the king's vengeance upon the Saracens. In the Chanson de Roland itself Turpin dies beside its hero, and is buried with him and Oliver at Blaye near Bordeaux. There was actually an Archbishop Tilpinus of Rheims (753-800); but there can be no doubt that the romance in its present form was put together in the first third of the 12th century, most probably with a view to the glory of St James of Compostella. From internal evidence it has seemed to critics highly probable that Pope Calixtus II. either wrote or at least inspired the work himself while yet Guy de Bourgogne, Archbishop of Vienne. The conclusion of Gaston Paris in his admirable work, De Pseudo
Turpino (1865), however, is that the first five chapters were written in Galicia, before the pretensions of Compostella had risen so high as they did towards the end of the 11th century; that the remaining chapters are too secular and too little in harmony with Galician traditions to have been written, or even formally sanctioned, by Calixtus; and that the epistle sometimes appended, bearing the name of that pope, is a manifest forgery. He goes on to state that the archbishop of Vienne, after the death of his brother in 1108, visited Compostella, and conjectures that one of his train found the first five chapters there, and that the remaining chapters were adapted from various French chansons by a monk of St André at Vienne. Reinhart P. A. Dozy, in the third edition of his Recherches sur l'Histoire et la Littérature de l'Espagne pendant le Moyen Âge (1881, tome ii.), concludes that these five chapters have been written by a Frenchman, and that subsequently to 1131; that chap. xx. is due to one of the clergy of Compostella, who wished to push its claims against Toledo for the primacy of Spain, perhaps between 1120 and 1124, perhaps much later; and that chap. ix. names three Mohammedan princes of Spain and Africa who flourished respectively in 1106-43, 1116-23, and 1125-38. Gaston Paris in Romania (tome xi. July 1882) accepts most of Dozy's conclusions, admits that the five chapters were written by a Frenchman at Compostella after 1069, but is reluctant to place them much later than 1100. He finally conjectures that the whole work may have been completed towards 1150 by Aimeri Picaud, the author of the Itinerary to Compostella.
The chronicle was printed by Simon Schard in Germanicarum rerum IV. vetustiores chronographi (Frankf. 1566), and by Justus Reuber in his Veteres Scriptores (Frankf. 1584); but the edition now generally used is that of Sebastiano Ciampi (Florence, 1822). An edition was prepared under the auspices of the Montpellier Société pour l'Étude des langues Romanes, by Ferdinand Castets (Montpellier and Paris, 1880). See Gaston Paris, De Pseudo Turpino (Paris, 1865); also the excellent account in H. L. D. Ward's Catalogue of Romances in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum (vol. i. 1883).