WITH THE ASSUMPTION of imperial power by the German Ottonian dynasty, Palm Sunday processions became more elaborate and, in much of continental Europe, more standardized. Sometime between 950 and 964, monks (or perhaps a single monk) at Saint Alban's Abbey in Mainz compiled a pontifical, a book of ceremonies to be presided over by a bishop. Surviving in some thirty-six manuscript copies, the influential Mainz compilation is now known as the Romano-German Pontifical, a name that reflects its dependence on older Roman and Gallican sources, its place of origin, and its subsequent authoritative diffusion throughout Germany and as far south as Rome. The effect of the pontifical on Palm Sunday processions, whether intentional or otherwise, was to codify and disseminate the inclination of the powerful to make elite Palm Sunday processions double as triumphal entries.

In this chapter, I begin with the Mainz pontifical itself, paying particular attention to the belief that processional crosses or other exalted Palm Sunday images embodied the immediate presence of Christ and were therefore worthy of veneration. I then follow the pontifical to Rome, where, as we have already seen in the case of Calixtus II, crowds “venerated” the pope “as the vicar of Christ” and “prostrated themselves before him with great devotion.” After Palm Sunday processions were introduced to Rome in the twelfth century, the pope himself became the feast day's object of veneration. I close the chapter with two variations, one strikingly eccentric, on the theme of Palm Sunday processional theatre in fifteenth-century Rome.

Palm Sunday worship, according to the Mainz pontifical, began at a church outside the city gates. This not only allowed the procession to follow more closely the pattern observed by the church in Jerusalem and so to represent more convincingly Christ's historical entry, but it also permitted the procession to approach its own city in the manner of a royal entry. The Carolingian Palm Sunday processions in Saint-Riquier and Angers, remaining within the abbey grounds or city walls, had not exercised this option.