Why Medieval Royalty Buried Their Hearts Separately

In the Augustinian Church in Vienna, a small chamber holds 54 silver urns. Each contains the heart of a Habsburg ruler or relative, while their bodies lie in a crypt a few streets away. The practice behind it, burying the heart apart from the body, was once common among Europe’s elite.

Why bury the heart separately at all?

Two reasons worked together. The first was practical. Medieval kings and crusaders often died far from where they wished to be buried, and a body could not travel for weeks in warm weather. The solution was to embalm it, or to divide it: the heart and entrails removed and buried locally or carried home in a casket, while the rest of the body followed or was buried where it fell. German nobles went further with a method known as mos Teutonicus, the German custom, in which the body was boiled so the bones could be carried home clean, with the flesh and organs buried on the spot, according to Wikipedia’s summary of the scholarship. It was cheaper and more hygienic than embalming.

The second reason was devotion. The heart was the seat of love, courage, and piety, and giving it to a favored abbey, cathedral, or city let a ruler rest in two places he loved, and gave each place a relic to honor. An Oxford Pitt Rivers Museum study notes that the custom, revived from older practice, spread among royalty, nobility, warriors, and clergy from the 12th to the 18th centuries.

Which famous hearts were buried this way?

• Richard I of England, the Lionheart, died in 1199 in France. His body went to Fontevraud Abbey, his entrails to Châlus where he died, and his heart, embalmed and sealed in lead, to Rouen Cathedral. It was rediscovered in 1838, and when scientists analyzed its remains in 2013 they found it had been preserved with vegetables and spices, which Mental Floss reports they linked to the embalming of Christ. Henry I’s heart had gone to Rouen a century earlier.
• Eleanor of Castile, queen of Edward I, has her heart and organs at Lincoln and her body at Westminster, according to the Pitt Rivers study.
• Robert the Bruce, King of Scots, asked on his deathbed in 1329 that his heart be carried to Jerusalem. Sir James Douglas took it on crusade and died in battle in Spain; the heart was recovered and buried at Melrose Abbey. The story survives in Barbour’s poem The Bruce, and a historian notes that a papal dispensation permitting the separate burial is on record, which makes the account likely true.
• The French kings Louis IX, Philip III, Louis XIII, and Louis XIV all had heart burials in Paris, according to the 1911 Britannica.
• The Habsburgs kept the custom longest. From the 17th century their hearts were placed in urns in the Loreto Chapel of Vienna’s Augustinian Church; by 1878 there were 54, including nine emperors, while all but three of the bodies lie in the Imperial Crypt nearby. The crypt can still be visited.

Did the Church approve?

Not always. Pope Boniface VIII, who held strongly to the ideal of the body’s integrity, issued the bull Detestande feritatis in 1299 condemning the dismembering and boiling of bodies, on pain of excommunication, according to Wikipedia’s account and the historian writing on Robert the Bruce. But exceptions could be bought or granted, which is how the Bruce record survives, and the 1911 Britannica notes that his successor Benedict XI withdrew the prohibition. The practice carried on for another four centuries.

Were other organs buried separately too?

Yes. Entrails removed in embalming were often given their own burial, usually with less ceremony. The 1911 Britannica records that the viscera of the popes from Sixtus V (1590) onward were preserved in a parish church near the Quirinal in Rome. The Pitt Rivers study notes that medieval society regarded entrails as ignoble, so these burials attracted little solemnity.

Did it ever stop?

Mostly, by the 19th century, as embalming improved, travel sped up, and attitudes toward the body changed. But it never quite ended. The sculptor Canova’s heart was interred in Venice in 1822, and Atlas Obscura notes that heart burial still occasionally occurs to express fondness for a place. Today’s version is gentler: families divide cremated remains between two places that mattered. The impulse to let a person rest where they were loved is the same. See what happens to your bones after burial and the medieval art of dying.

This is a history article. Customs varied by place, class, and family, and the sources are historians, museums, and period publications rather than contemporary records in every case.