ABSTRACT
Charlemagne is at the center of the chansons de geste: many of the surviving epics can be grouped around him and even more so around the other rulers of the Carolingian dynasty, fused by time within the person of Charlemagne. Nevertheless, such terms as "King Cycle" or geste du roi remain problematic, since the poems about Charlemagne were never systematically grouped in a cycle like those of Guillaume d'Orange. The influence of the Pseudo-Turpin is felt even later in a series of romanticized poems, such as Aspremont, Gui de Bourgogne, and Otinel. Within the King Cycle, it is the Spanish expedition and, to a lesser degree, the acquisition of the relics of Christ's Passion by the abbey of Saint-Denis that form a further point of departure for poetic treatment. There is, however, no cohesion among the poems, many of which show centrifugal tendencies and resist a systematic grouping.
