Empress Adelheid and Countess Matilda by Penelope Nash

Author:Penelope Nash
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US, New York

A Model for Queenship

The Italian queens had a unique longstanding role in legitimizing the kingdom. When Theudelinda’s first Lombard husband, Authari, died in September 590, the Lombard leading men asked her to select a new husband and leader. She chose Agilulf, a kinsman of her deceased husband. After Agilulf died the Lombard leading men swore fealty to her. Similarly her daughter was attributed with the same power to place a new husband on the Lombard throne. 70 Empress Angelberga was a powerbroker in Italy up to the death of her husband Louis II in 875. 71 In the mid-tenth century Adelheid strengthened and legitimized Otto’s right to the Italian kingdom.

According to Hrotsvitha, Adelheid’s first husband, King Lothar, had acted ‘rightly’ in ‘leaving the kingdom of Italy to be held fast by the merit of the eminent queen’. 72 In addition, ‘She possessed such pre-eminent natural abilities that she could have ruled worthily the state bequeathed to her’. 73 Odilo of Cluny grants her the honor of bringing not just the queenship, through her marriage to Lothar, but also the empire to Otto I. Otto married Adelheid before he had fought and won the prestigious Battle of the Lech in 955. Otto’s father, King Henry I, nominated Otto as successor to the East-Frankish lands over his younger brother, Henry, who may have had some entitlement because (unlike Otto) he had been born after his father became king. However, Henry’s entitlement to the throne, asserted by Liudprand and by the unknown author of the ‘Later Life’ of Queen Mathilda, was spurious since the kingdom had already become indivisible. 74 Nevertheless further legitimization was needed and Otto’s marriage to Adelheid provided that.

Sometime after Otto I succeeded his father, he made his brother Henry duke of Bavaria. The anonymous writer of the Vita Mathildis and Odilo of Cluny in his Epitaphium used the same word ‘prefecit’, with the meaning of ‘put in charge (of)’ or ‘ascribed to (a person) the charge (of)’. The contemporary use of this word is worth examining further. Adelheid played a key role in helping to secure Otto’s claims to the Italian throne, paved the way for his imperial coronation and took a prominent position in imperial politics, with a particular influence on ‘“policies” in the regnum Italiae’. 75 Moreover she did not merely bolster Otto’s power and her influence was more important than simply bringing the lands under his sway; she may have taken a more active part than is realized. 76 In more detail the word praeficere (or preficere) means to put in charge of or to set over military forces, units of civil administration, another person or places; to ascribe to a person the charge of something; or to cause to take precedence of or to prefer to. 77 The word has an interesting history in Ottonian times. In the Vita Mathildis Otto I put his brother, Henry, in charge (‘prefecit’) over the Bavarian people as dux in 947. 78 Adalbert of Magdeburg records that Otto gave

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