JUDITH OF BAVARIA AND JUDITH OF FLANDERS
If mythical women stood at the beginnings of origin legends, this may be because real flesh-and-blood women stood at the beginnings of great aristocratic families. After all, such families of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries largely owed their status, their lands, and their power to women. As Constance Bouchard and before her Karl Ferdinand Werner have pointed out, the great comital families might often appear to spring from “new men” in the ninth or tenth centuries, but actually these new men owed their rise to fortuitous marriages with greater, established families.1
Family chroniclers and genealogists were well aware of the importance of such marriages in preserving and augmenting family power and honor — it was a constant and essential element in generational strategies throughout the Middle Ages. As Anita Guerreau-Jalabert has argued, the image of a strictly agnatic descent through generations is more an invention of nineteenth-century genealogists than a reflection of medieval perceptions of kinship.2 At the same time, the question of how much credit for the successes of kindreds should be attributed to these women rather than to the men of the kindred remained very much in question. As Janet Nelson points out, elite women played a double symbolic role within their husbands’ lineages: first, they made possible the continuation of the lineage, but at the same time, because they did not themselves belong to it, they made possible the individualization of a particular offspring within the lineage.3 Thus reconstruction of family histories meant coming to terms, under differing needs and circumstances, with the relative importance of such marriages and of the women who put not only their dowries and their bodies but their personalities and kinsmen to work on behalf of their husbands and their children. Over time, the ideological imperative of illustrious male descent could best be fostered if memory of the women who made their rise possible was removed from center stage in favor of the audacious acts of men.
In the ninth century, two great families arose because of two women named Judith — a fortuitous name that recalled the widow who, during the siege of Jerusalem by the Assyrians, saves her city by pretending to offer herself to Holofernes only to behead him and return in triumph to her people.4 The biblical Judith was thus, as Heide Estes has pointed out, one of the few models of a woman playing an active role in public life available, although the reception of the story of Judith in the Middle Ages shows the dangerous ambiguity attached to this woman.5 The younger of the Judiths considered in this chapter was the grand-daughter of the elder, and their stories illustrate the two principal ways that women could be at the start of families’ fortunes. The story of how these beginnings were reformed over time suggests the complexities of aristocratic dynastic memory in the tenth through twelfth centuries.
Empress Judith
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The first Judith illustrates how the marriage of a daughter to a king or great aristocrat raised the status of her father and brothers. With the marriage, the family achieved a proximity to the king, her brothers and cousins became part of the royal inner circle, forming a powerful faction at court. This was especially true when the queen was a forceful and competent figure, using her traditional role as manager of the royal household and her influence with her husband and, eventually, her son, on behalf of her kin. Such women could well be considered founding mothers. The greatest example of such an ascent through the marriage of a daughter to a king was that of the Welfs, the most powerful noble lineage in the Staufer Empire.6
The Welfs are also one of the most precocious families in terms of their interest in their origins. Already in the early twelfth century, the family had a notion of their origins and identity in written form. By the end of the century, this family’s sense of its past was integral not only to its image of its contemporary power but also to its claims to royal power. First studied in a pioneering article by Karl Schmid in 1968,7 the Welfs and their genealogical literature have been a touchstone of subsequent investigations of the representation of genealogical consciousness in the medieval aristocracy.8 As a result, they are an ideal vehicle through which to examine an aristocratic family’s memory of the women who were largely responsible for its fortunes.
The first known Welf was already a powerful figure in the first half of the ninth century, characterized by the biographer of Louis the Pious, Thegan, as being “from the most noble kindred of the Bavarians.”9 This was not, however, exactly true. The eighth-century redaction of the Laws of the Bavarians lists the five most important ‘genealogiae or kindreds of the Bavarians whose status stood just below the ducal Agilufings. Welf and his family are not among them, although they may have already formed marriage alliances with some of these key Bavarian clans.10 One can more honestly conclude that they were a family on the rise, lacking the truly illustrious ancestry of the Agilufings or Huosi, but moving up in the new social order of the Carolingian world.11 They may have been relatively recently established in Bavaria, with deeper roots in Alemannia or in the old Frankish Austrasian heartland from which the Carolingians themselves had arisen.12 In any event, thisWelf himself had married Heilwig, a member of an aristocratic Saxon family.13 His kindred were clearly part of the great imperial aristocracy, with lands and power throughout the eastern portions of the Carolingian world. But the alliance that moved this kindred to the very center of the Frankish stage was the marriage of Judith, daughter ofWelf and Heilwig, to the emperor Louis the Pious in 819, following the death of Louis’s first wife, Irmingard. Judith, according to the Annales regni Francorum and the account of an anonymous biographer of Louis known as the Astronomer, was selected in a sort of beauty pageant, in which the emperor examined daughters of the nobility before making his choice, a practice some have seen as imitating Byzantine tradition.14 More recently, Mayke de Jong has pointed out that this description, and particularly that of the “Astronomer,” is less a reflection of Byzantine court tradition than an image of Judith modeled on the biblical figure of Esther, a comparison already made by Hrabanus Maurus in his defense of the empress.15 Certainly Louis was not simply choosing a beauty queen: he was allying himself with Judith’s father and his family. That this marriage was such an alliance is demonstrated by a second royal marriage that shortly followed. Sometime between 825 and 827, Hemma, the sister of the Empress Judith, married the emperor’s son by his first marriage, Louis the German, king in East Francia and Bavaria. Finally, Konrad the Elder, brother of Judith and Hemma, married Adelheid, the sister-in-law of Louis the Pious’s son Lothar I. The marriage of Judith thus marked the ultimate achievement of a great family — an unprecedented alliance with the Carolingians — and the start of ever closer relations with the royal house.
As mother of Charles the Bald, Judith played a more active, public role than any previous Carolingian queen, intervening on behalf of her favorites and devoting her energies to assuring the future of her son. She was also the channel for imperial favor, which allowed her brothers and other relations to win offices and lands from the king, both in the West Frankish kingdom of Charles and more widely in Alemannia, Bavaria, Raetia, Burgundy, and Lothringia. One relative acquired control over the most important monasteries in West Francia, while others established their power over Auxerre, Sens, St. Maurice d’Agaune, Jumieges, St. Riquier, and Valenciennes. Judith was no passive figure in the reign of her husband and soon became the target of the hatred and aggression launched by Louis’s older sons in response to his desires to carve out a kingdom for Charles the Bald.16
As the Carolingian Empire fragmented, most of the near-term advantages gained by the Welfs proved short-lived, although one grand-nephew of Judith, Rudolf, attained the kingship of Burgundy in 888 and established a kingdom that endured for several generations. Elsewhere, particularly in Swabia, the Welfs kept a lower profile but continued to consolidate their lands and especially their relationships with important monastic foundations.17
A woman thus played a crucial role in the origin and destiny of theWelfs. Judith, through her marriage and through her continuing influence on her husband, established the foundations, however discontinuous, that would allow the Welfs in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to return to the center of the European stage. While in the post-Carolingian period the family retained lands and local power in Swabia, the Welfs disappeared from imperial and royal power, although they gradually built their lordship around Altdorf/Ravensburg and demanded ducal status in competition with the Staufer. Around 1120, a second Welf Judith wed Duke Frederick II of Swabia in an attempt to put an end to these great families’ rivalry. She bore Frederick Barbarossa, who, although celebrated as the “cornerstone” to end the conflicts between the two families, ultimately continued the conflict with Henry the Lion as the representative of the great ducal family.
The Welfs took a precocious interest in their family history, being among the first nonroyal families whose origins and genealogies were recorded in their house monasteries, presumably drawing on both written records and family memories and focusing on the formal, liturgical memoria of family members. The result is the existence of three twelfth-century genealogical accounts of the family’s origins and history that allow us to see how Judith was remembered within the family. The earliest, the Genealogia Welforum, was written in the Swabian monastery of Weingarten sometime before the death of Duke Henry the Black of Bavaria in 1126.18 The second, the so-called Saxon Welf source is now lost in its original form but can be reconstructed from later texts, in particular a supplement to the Saxon World Chronicle composed in the 1130s at St. Michael’s monastery at Lüneberg, which represents a Saxon version of Welf memory.19 The third is the Historia Welforum Weingartensis, produced around 1170 in upper Swabia.20 Together these three texts allow one to follow the reflections of various members of the Welf kindred across time as they reflect on their origins and the relative importance of their ancestors in securing their power and status.
The authors of these three texts do not ignore women in the history of the family. Marriage alliances and mothers of significant Welfs are regularly reported. And yet, while these women are present, their presence and their importance is strictly circumscribed, even undercut, by the manner in which they are treated. This is particularly true for the woman whose marriage and subsequent role was paramount for the Welf family, the first Judith, wife of Louis the Pious.
The first record of the Welf family history distorts and undermines the role of the pivotal Judith. First, Judith herself has disappeared entirely. Although the typology of the Judith story remains, it is a fictional one. The laconic Genealogia records simply: “Eticho sired a son Henry and a daughter Hiltigard. The Emperor Louis the Stammerer received Hiltigard as wife. Henry made himself the man of the Emperor. His father established twelve monks in Ammergau and there he died.”21 In this earliest version of a family origin myth, all memory of the great figures of the ninth century, including Judith and her father Welf, thus disappear in favor of a legend that ties the origin of the family to a relatively obscure Swabian noble and a marriage that never took place.
The second text, written in Saxony and drawing no doubt on Carolingian historiography, restores Judith to the story (and likewise the first Welf, here given the double name Eticho Welf, indicating that in the oral traditions within the kindred the memory of Eticho remained powerful). And yet, this time Judith’s role is undercut in yet another manner. In this account, the Eticho Welf is the father of Judith, “whom Louis [the Pious] took in marriage after the death of Empress Irmingarde and of whom he begot Caesar Charles the Bald.”22 Notice how passive Judith appears in this description: she is taken as wife and of her is generated Charles. She does make an important contribution to the future of the Welf family, however, by counseling her brother to become the vassal of Louis. But this counsel splits her family and could have destroyed their honor. Her father, Welf, is characterized as a prince of highest freedom who would never submit to anyone for a fief, even to the emperor, and orders his son Henry to refuse as well. However Henry, “by the persuasion of his sister Judith” agreed to become the vassal of Louis for a fief of the size that he could circumnavigate at noon with a plow. Welf was said to be so opposed to his daughter’s proposition, tantamount to abandoning the family’s freedom and honor, that he left Bavaria with twelve followers and lived out the remainder of his life in self-imposed exile with them in the area of Scharnitzwald, never again to see his son or his daughter.
Ultimately Henry triumphed, but he did so not through the marriage of his sister with Louis but in spite of it — through his own cleverness (caliditate sua). Concealing a small golden plow on his person, and setting out in advance relays of fresh horses at regular intervals, he set off at a furious pace while the emperor was taking his noonday nap and quickly rode around a vast amount of territory. When the emperor awoke, Henry demanded that he honor his bargain and invest him with the enormous territory that he had claimed. Louis was indignant that he had been tricked, but remembering his promise, had no choice but to grant Henry this vast territory, which formed the core of the Welf’s lands in the future.
The story of “Henry of the Golden Plow” both writes Judith into the memory of the Welf’s first rise to prominence and at the same time minimizes her role in this rise. Her marriage to Louis is important, but from the perspective of the anonymous Saxon annalist, it is also fraught with danger. Rather than promoting the interests of her family, she urges their subservience to her husband. Only Henry’s cleverness prevents, or perhaps mitigates, this dishonor. True, he is still the vassal of the emperor, but he is also lord of a vast territory that he has won, not through his sister’s intervention, but through trickery. Having been able to dupe his lord, his position as vassal is hardly one of humble obedience.23 Henry has in a sense triumphed not only over Louis but over his sister as well.
Subsequently, Judith remains in the family’s memory, but not a principal actor in its history. In the Historia Welforum, and representing, as Karl Schmid showed, tradition of the upper Swabian Welf court, Judith’s role is entirely marginal:
"Welf sired a son named Eticho and a daughter Judith. Louis the emperor, known as the Pious, took this Judith as wife after the death of his wife Irmingard, from whom he had produced three sons, Lothar, Pipin and Louis. From her he sired Charles the Bald, who obtained the kingdom of the Franks in the division of the empire, and who ruled strenuously for forty-five years while his brothers Lothar and Louis reigned in Italy and in Alemannia, after the third brother, Pipin, had died".24
In this version, then, Eticho is the son of Welf and the brother of Judith. The opportunity to become the vassal of the emperor does not arise in this generation at all, but in the next. Eticho in turn sires Henry and, when his son swears fealty to the emperor, retires to the forest and founds the monastery of Amberg. Judith has no role at all in the events leading up to the land acquisition and thus the foundation of the Swabian Welfs’ territorial lordship.
Judith of Flanders
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The memory of Empress Judith shows the transformation of a family’s memory of its rise facilitated by a marriage into a royal family. A more common marriage alliance that facilitated a family’s advancement was the union of a man of lower status with a woman of higher status. As Georges Duby argued years ago, women marry down, men marry up: these higher-status marriages could launch or consolidate a kindred’s position. Everyone was aware of the implications of such a marriage, the “rule of play,” as Gerd Althoff would term such implicit but clearly established norms.25 Marriages of royal daughters were not entered into lightly: Charlemagne went so far as to forbid his daughters to marry, preferring to tolerate their informal alliances and a growing number of bastard grandchildren rather than elevate their aristocratic lovers and their kindreds by the contracting of a formal marriage alliance.
Normally, when such a marriage took place, it was part of a negotiation with the higher-status family: a daughter given in marriage could be a reward for past support as well as a guarantee of support in the future. But this was not always the case. In the most dramatic case of the ninth century, the similarly named grand-daughter of the Empress Judith brought the family of the counts of Flanders into royal proximity but in a striking way: the Count of Flanders eloped with Judith, the daughter of Charles the Bald, risking all to achieve an alliance, however unwilling, with the royal family.
The story is dramatic and complex. Judith had been married twice previously. Her first marriage in 856, when she was about twelve years old, had been arranged by her father and was a calculated match of royal strategy. Charles gave her to King Æthelwulf of Wessex (reigned 839–58), a powerful warrior king who had been widowed and was on the Continent returning from a pilgrimage to Rome when he and Charles met and contracted the marriage. The union came at a moment of internal and external danger for the Carolingian. Western counts, angered by Charles’s grants to his son Louis the Stammerer of important parts of Neustria, had revolted, rallying around his other son, Charles of Aquitaine. At the same time, Viking raiders, possibly in coordination with the rebels, sailed up the Seine and plundered the cities, monasteries, and estates. Charles the Bald probably hoped that this alliance with theWessex dynasty would bring him assistance against both of these threats.26
In any event, he saw to it that following the marriage Archbishop Hincmar of Reims consecrated and crowned Judith, and his new son-in-law, contrary to West Saxon tradition, conferred on her the title of queen.27 King Æthelwulf died shortly after, and his successor and son by a previous marriage, King Æthelbald, hoping to maintain the alliance, immediately married his stepmother. This alliance proved ephemeral as well: Æthelbald died in 860. The twice-widowed Judith then returned to the Continent, where her father sent her to Senlis, according to the Chronicle of St. Bertin, “under his protection and royal and episcopal guardianship, with all the honour due to a queen, until such time as, if she could not remain chaste, she might marry in the way the apostle said, that is suitably and legally.”28 Presumably, Charles was waiting to arrange another advantageous marriage for his daughter. However, the royal and episcopal guardians must not have been very vigilant: Judith ran off with Baldwin, a count whose county included at that time merely a narrow band along the coast from Bruges to the mouth of the River Aa.
Generally, Baldwin is credited with the initiative in this audacious gamble, and no doubt this is largely true.29 However, as Janet Nelson has pointed out, the most comprehensive contemporary source, the Annals of St. Bertin, make Judith the actor in the elopement, not simply the passive victim of bride theft: “Charles now learned that she had changed her widow’s clothing and gone off with Count Baldwin, at his instigation and with her brother Louis’s consent.”30 This description suggests that Baldwin was acting in alliance with Louis, and one may presume that Judith was the reward for Baldwin’s support. However, the way that the Annals describe Judith’s own role suggest that perhaps, after two previous forced marriages, although only sixteen-years-old, the queen may have been ready to take her fate in her hands, seeking out a match that would remove her from the role of pawn in her father’s political strategies and provide her with greater personal autonomy than would a marriage with another king.
It was a dangerous gamble: her father was furious—at Baldwin, at Judith, and no doubt at Louis. At his demand, Pope Nicholas I excommunicated the couple. Baldwin and Judith rushed to Rome and brought their cause directly to the pontiff. In time they managed to convince him to rescind the excommunication and even to intervene on their behalf with Charles. After two years, urged by the pope and pressured by the Viking chief who controlled Frisia, Charles finally accepted the elopement as a fait accompli and permitted Judith to marry the count. As Baldwin had hoped, the royal marriage alliance brought with it more than just a bride. He received from Charles the county of Flanders (a smaller area than the Flanders of the High Middle Ages), and in time Ternois, the area of Waas, and the lay abbacy of St. Pieter of Ghent.31 Baldwin proved a fairly faithful vassal to Charles, although he carefully maintained his relations with Charles’s son, who had defied his father by countenancing the elopement and marriage in the first place.
Shortly after Baldwin’s death in 879, his son Baldwin II was forced to flee a furious Viking onslaught, abandoning most of his lands. Although he married Aelfthryth, the daughter of King Alfred the Great, he seems to have been willing to cooperate with the Danes when advantageous, only going on the offense when they left the region. Gradually Baldwin II managed to reconquer his paternal inheritance and even expand his holdings, establishing his countship over an enlarged “Flanders” that included not only the pagi of Ghent and Waas but Mempisc, Courtrai, the Ijzer, Ternois, Boulonnais, and much of the Tournaisis.32 By his death in 918, he had created an extensive territorial principality independent of royal control.
In a real sense, then, Baldwin II might be seen as the founder of the family’s fortunes. Initially, however, his parents’ marriage loomed large in the memories of the descendants of Baldwin and Judith as the foundation story of the dynasty. The earliest account, written by Witger between 951 and 959 and preserved in the great Flemish monastery of St. Bertin, emphasizes the royal descent of the family through Judith.33 It begins with a genealogy of the Carolingians to the children of Charles the Simple, derived from the Genealogia Fontanellensi.34 Then its rubrics announce, “Here begins the holy race of the most glorious lord Count Arnulf [I “The Great” 918–65] and his son Baldwin [III,d. 962], whom the Lord deign to protect in this world.”35 The genealogy then starts, not with Baldwin I, but with Judith, who had been introduced in the previous, Carolingian genealogy as the daughter of Charles the Bald and Ermentrudis: “Which most prudent and beautiful Judith the most powerful Count Baldwin joined to himself in the bonds of matrimony.” It then continues, “From her he engendered a son, bestowing on him the same name as his own, that is Baldwin.”36 Nothing is said of Judith’s status as an Anglo-Saxon queen, only as a Carolingian. Baldwin II’s marriage is recorded, but not the name of his wife Aelfthryth or her father Alfred, only that she was “from the most noble race of the trans-maritime kingdom.” Nor is anything said of Baldwin I’s own parentage. He emerges only with his marriage to the royal family, a relationship emphasized later in the genealogy when, recounting Arnulf ’s pious donations, he reminds his readers that the monastery of Saint-Corneille in Compie`gne to which he was particularly generous “had been founded by his great-great-grandfather Charles the Bald.” Clearly, it was Judith whom Witger wished to emphasize as he recounted the origins of the counts. For Witger, the comital family began with the marriage of Judith and Baldwin. In the tenth century, the family’s Carolingian origins were clearly at the center of their dynastic concerns, and Judith was their source.37
By the early twelfth century, when the second Flemish genealogy was written at St. Bertin, the family no longer began with Judith and her marriage to Baldwin. Judith is still present and still the daughter of Charles the Bald, but the family’s origins start two generations earlier with one Lidricus, count of Harlebeke. He in turn was the father of Ingelram, the father of Audacer, who is said to be the father of Baldwin.38 These shadowy figures from the first half of the ninth century certainly existed, although what their relationship to each other was and whether they were indeed the ancestors of Baldwin is quite uncertain. What matters for the genealogist is that Baldwin was not the first of his lineage, and thus his marriage did not create the family. Nor is his marriage with Judith particularly emphasized in the text. His is but the first of a series of marriages with royalty. The marriage of Baldwin II is described in exactly the same terms as that of his father, even if the author erred both on the name of the Anglo-Saxon king and his daughter: “Audacer begat Baldwin Iron Arm who married the daughter of Charles the Bald by name Judith. Baldwin Iron Arm begat Baldwin the Bald, who married the daughter of King Edger of the English, by name Elftruda.”39 Nor are these royal marriages the last enumerated by the anonymous author: Arnulf II (965–88) married Rozela Susanne, daughter of King Berengar of Lombardy, and Baldwin V (1037–67) married Adela, daughter of King Robert II of France. However, none of these royal unions is particularly favored or emphasized. It is rather the cumulative effect of these brilliant marriages that carries forward the comital family.
Around 1120, Lambert of Saint Omer included in his encyclopedic compendium, the Liber Floridus, a genealogy of the counts of Flanders that expanded on the received tradition and reincorporated information on Judith from the Annals of St. Bertin. In his account, in 792, during the reign of Charlemagne, Lidricus, the count of Harlebeke, found the region of Flanders deserted and occupied it. Lambert then writes that Lidricus begat Ingelram, and Ingelram in turn begat Audricus/Audacer, the father of Baldwin I “Ferreus.” He then continues:
"Baldwin begat Baldwin the Bald from Judith, the widow of Adelbald king of the Angles, the daughter of Charles the Bald, king of the Franks. He [Adelbald] however died before taking her away as wife in the same year that he had accepted her. After his death, Judith, selling her possessions that she had obtained in the kingdom of the English, returned to her father and was being watched over under paternal guardianship at Senlis".40
Lambert then goes on to cite the story of her flight and marriage to Baldwin in a verbatim citation from the Annals of St. Bertin, as well as the story of the seduction, the excommunication of the couple, their appeal to Pope Nicholas, and his eventual reconciliation of the king to his daughter and Baldwin.
As in the St. Bertin genealogy, the marriage of Baldwin and Judith is the first of a series of royal marriages uniting counts of Flanders with royal families. Lambert retained the language of the St. Bertin Annals, Judith is still active in the affair, but she is not part of the foundation legend of the family. Rather, her enticement by Baldwin is paralleled by the seizure, two generations earlier, of Flanders by Count Lidricus of Harlebeke. It is this mythical figure who, in seizing what he wants from under the nose of Charlemagne, prefigures the audacity of Baldwin Iron Arm who seizes Charlemagne’s great-granddaughter from under the nose of her father.
A final, even more elaborate genealogical account of the Flemish counts was written sometime after 1160. This text, the Flandria generosa, expands still further on the account in Lambert. Here, however, the action is clear: “In the year 862 Baldwin Iron Arm abducted Judith, widow of Adelbald, king of the English and daughter of Charles the Bald, king of the Franks.”41 The remainder of the account is virtually the same as that in Lambert and thus in the Annals, but interpolations in an early manuscript emphasize the obvious point that the abduction is all about Baldwin: Judith is said to have loved the count greatly on account of his “probitas,” which might ironically be translated “uprightness.” The pope is said to have agreed to intervene upon meeting Baldwin and seeing that he was “a very handsome young man and upright.”42
As in Lambert, the story told in Flandria generosa of Baldwin’s audacious marriage is no longer about Judith and certainly not the foundation story of the family. It is but one in a series of remarkable successes by this family of audacious and successful counts, who before and after Baldwin Iron Arm display the virtues of their “true” beginning, those of Lidricus.
Baldwin was no doubt quite a capable figure: had he not have been, Judith and her brother would certainly have chosen someone else as husband. However, what we see in the story of Baldwin and Judith is how the initial recognition of the foundation of the comital family made possible by a royal marriage fades as the male members of the family before and after are used to demonstrate a tradition of royal marriages and audacious deeds. Judith is no longer, as she was in the tenth century, the beginning of the family. She is but one more Carolingian property seized by a bold member of the Flemish dynasty.
And yet, this progressive erasure of Judith is anything but a simple reflection of the progressive marginalization of Flemish countesses during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Quite the opposite is true.43 Even while Judith was being reduced to one more clever conquest, a series of powerful countesses were playing active and critical roles in the governance of the county. In the eleventh century, Richtilde, the widow of Count Baldwin VI, fought to protect the rights of her sons Arnulf and Baldwin from their half-brother Robert the Frisian. Robert II’s powerful wife Clementia of Burgundy, sister of Pope Calixtus II, shared power in Flanders with her son Baldwin following Robert’s death in 1111. Sybil of Anjou, the second wife of Count Thierry, helped bring her husband into the patronage of King Henry II of England and twice served as regent while Thierry was at the Crusades, before accompanying him to Jerusalem and entering the convent of Saint-Lazarus at Bethany. These three women were just some of the powerful countesses in Flanders, who numbered among the most active, and at times most problematic, figures in Flemish history. One might see the effacement of Judith in genealogical memory as a critical response to, rather than a reflection of, women and power in the county.
The fates of the two Judiths in dynastic memory demonstrates both the vital importance of women in weaving the generations of a family and the strict limits to these women’s roles. Daughters of kings or wives of kings brought enormous prestige and the chance for honors and riches to their male kindred both in their lifetimes and beyond. Both the Welfs and the Flemish counts long cherished and cultivated stories of their illustrious ancestry and close relationship with the Carolingian dynasty cemented through their Judiths. And yet, as time passed, one senses a reticence to attribute this good fortune to these founding mothers.
Henry of the Golden Plow, far from obtaining honor from his wife, was tempted by her to cast the honor and liberty of his family aside and managed, only through his own cleverness, to triumph. Lidricus, the mythical ancestor of the counts of Flanders, likewise managed to acquire his vast lands from the Carolingians, not as dowry or favor but through trickery. And ultimately Baldwin Iron Arm managed, by seducing Judith, to obtain his relationship to the king in spite of the latter.
In the ninth-century texts, both Judiths were participants in the fates of their husbands, but this too disappeared across the generations. The Judiths, like other women whose marriages made and sustained these families, were less participants in the rise of their husbands’ fortunes than they were archetypal booty — among the first possessions that their husbands would acquire. Such was certainly not a description of these women at the origins of these families, nor was it an accurate description of the women who came after them, but it was the way that those responsible for family memory wished that they were.
Just why men might wish that women were less prominent in the origins and identities of their kindreds can perhaps be glimpsed by considering the effects on gender balance in the most important genealogy in the West, that of the family of Jesus.
Notes
1. For example, the house of Anjou, which Karl Ferdinand Werner traces to the marriage of Ingelgarius, father of Fulk the Red, and Adelais, a member of the powerful Widonen clan, which launched the fortunes of the family in Brittany and Anjou. Karl Ferdinand Werner, “Untersuchungen zur Fruhzeit des franzosischen Furstentums (9.–10. Jahrhundert),” Die Welt als Geschichte 18 (1958): 264–79. Bernard Bachrach has attempted unconvincingly to refine Werner’s research in “Some Observations on the Origins of the Angevin Dynasty,” Medieval Prosopography 10 (1989): 1–24, which he repeats in Fulk Nerra, the Neo-Roman Consul, 987–1040: A Political Biography of the Angevin Count (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 1–4, but see Christian Settipani, “Les comtes d’Anjou et leurs alliances aux Xe et XIe siecles,” in K.S.B. Keats-Rohan, ed., Family Trees and the Roots of Politics: The Prosopography of Britain and France from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge, UK:Boydell Press, 1997), pp. 211–69, esp. pp. 212–18. On other such families, see Constance Brittain Bouchard, Those of My Blood, esp. pp. 22–38.
2. Anita Guerreau-Jalabert, “Sur les structures de parente dans l’Europe medievale,” Annales ESC 36 (1981), 1028–49; and “La parente dans l’Europe medievale et moderne: A propos d’une synthese recente,” L’Homme 110 (1989): 69–93.
3. Nelson, “Perceptions du pouvoir chez les historiennes du haute moyen age,” in La femme au moyen-age, p. 79.
4. The Book of Judith is not part of the Hebrew Bible and thus is counted among the apocrypha. Jerome included it in the Vulgate although the text from which he translated it differs greatly from the Septuagint version.
5. On the ambiguities of Judith in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, see Heide Estes, “Feasting with Holofernes,” Exemplaria 15 (2003): 325–50. On the continental receptions of Judith in relationship to the wife of Louis the Pious, see Elizabeth Ward, “Caesar’s Wife: The Career of the Empress Judith, 819–829,” in Peter Godman and Roger Collins, eds., Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious (814–840) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp.205–27, esp. 222.
6. On the Welfs, see in general Bernd Schneidmu¨ller, Die Welfen: Herrschaft und Errinerung (819–1252) (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2000).
7. Karl Schmid, “Welfisches Selbstverstandnis,” in J. Fleckenstein and Karl Schmid, eds., Adel und Kirche: Gerd Tellenbach um 65. Geburtstag (Freiburg:Herder, 1968), pp. 389–416.
8. Especially the studies of Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Die ‘sachsische Welfenquelle’ als Zeugnis der welfischen Hausu¨berlieferung,” Deutsches Archiv 24 (1968): 435–97; Oexle, “Welfische Memoria: Zugleich ein Beitrag uber adlige Hausuberlieferung und die Kriterien ihrer Erforschung,” in Bernd Schneidmuller, ed., Die Welfen und ihr Braunschweiger Hof im hohen Mittelalter (Wiesbaden:Harrossowitz, 1995), pp. 61–94; and among the studies of Bernd Schneidmuller, especially “Landesherrschaft, welfische Indentitat und Gruppen im deutschen Mittelalter,” in Peter Moraw, ed., Regionale Identitat und soziale Gruppen im deutschen Mittelalter, Zeitschrift fur historische Forschung, Beiheft 14 (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1992), pp. 65–101. However, the extent to which the kin of Welf and his daughter Judith formed a cohesive party in the ninth century can be exaggerated. See Janet L. Nelson, Charles the Bald (London: Longman, 1992), pp. 177–80.
9. Thegan, Gesta Hludowici imperatoris, ed. Ernst Tremp., MGH SSRG i.u.s. 64 (Hanover, 1995), c. 26, p. 214. See Schmid, “Welfisches Selbstverstandnis,” n. 12.
10. Lex Baiwariorum, 3.1. “De genealogia qui vocantur Hosi, Drazza Fagana Hahilinga Anniona isti sunt quasi primi post Agilolfingos qui sunt de genere ducali,” ed. Ernst von Schwind, MGH Leges nationum Germanicarum, sec. 1, vol. 5, part 2 (Hanover, 1926), pp. 312–13. Wolfgang Metz, “Heinrich mit dem goldenen Wagen,” in Blatter fur deutsche Landesgeschichte 107 (1971): 136–61, esp. 148, suggests a connection with the Huosi and other leading Bavarian families. This may be the case, but one should not read the list of Bavarian kindreds as a fixed, exclusive identity. See Karl Brunner, Oppositionelle Gruppen im Karolingerreich, Veroffentlichungen des Instituts fur osterreichische Geschichtsforschung 25 (Vienna: Hermann Bohlaus Nach, 1979), esp. pp. 102–3.
11. Silvia Konecny, “Eherecht und Ehepolitik unter Ludwig dem Frommen,” Mitteilungen des Instituts fur osterreichische Geschichtsforschung 85 (1977): 1– 21, esp. 15.
12. Bernd Schneidmuller, “Landesherrschaft, welfische Identitat und sachsiche Geshichte,” in Peter Moraw, ed., Regionale Identitat und soziale Gruppen im deutschen Mittelalter, Zeitschrift fur historische Forschung, Beiheft 14 (Berlin:Duncker and Humblot, 1992), pp. 65–101.
13. Thegan, Gesta Hludowici imperatoris, MGH SSRG i.u.s., 64, c. 26, p. 214.
14. Annales regni Francorum, ed. Friderich Kurze, MGH SSRG i.u.s. 6 (Hanover, 1895), an. 819, p. 150: “Imperator inspectis plerisque nobilium filiabus Huelpi comitis filiam nomine Iudith duxit uxorem.” Astronomus, Vita Hludowici imperatoris, ed. Ernst Tremp, MGH SSRG i.u.s. 64 (Hanover, 1995), p. 32. See Brunner, Oppositionelle Gruppen, p. 102; Egon Boshof, Ludwig der Fromme (Darmstadt: Primus, 1996), p. 152.
15. Hrabanus Maurus, Epistolae, no. 17a, ed. Ernst Dummler, MGH Epistolae 5 (Berlin, 1899), pp. 420–21. See Mayke de Jong, “Bride Shows Revisited: Praise, Slander and Exegesis in the Reign of the Empress Judith,” in Leslie Brubaker and Julia M. H. Smith, eds., Gender in the Early Medieval World, pp.257–77.
16. And she paid the price of being branded an adulteress. Genevieve Buhrer-Thierry, “La reine adultere,” Cahiers de Civilisation Medievale 35 (1992): 299–312. See also Pauline Stafford, Queens, Concubines, and Dowagers:The King’s Wife in the Early Middle Ages (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), esp. pp. 18–20 and 83; Elizabeth Ward, “Agobard of Lyons and Paschasius Radbertus as Critics of the Empress Judith,” in W. J. Sheils and D. Wood, eds., Women in the Church, Studies in Church History 27 (Oxford:Blackwell, 1990), pp. 15–25;Ward, “Caesar’s Wife”; and de Jong, “Bride Shows Revisited,” p. 262.
17. Generally on theWelfs in the later ninth century, see Schneidmuller, Die Welfen, pp. 58–72.
18. GeneologiaWelforum, ed. Georg Pertz, MGH SS 13 (Hanover, 1881), pp. 733–34. See also Oexle, “Welfische Memoria.”
19. Sa¨chsische Weltchronik, ed. Ludwig Weiland, MGH Deutsche Chroniken 2 (Hanover, 1877), pp. 1–384. See also Oexle, “‘Die sachsische Welfenquelle’”; and Oexle, “Bischof Konrad von Konstanz in der Erinnerung der Welfen und der welfischen Hausuberlieferung wahrend des 12. Jahrhunderts,” Freiburger Diozesan-Archiv 95 (1975): 7–40; and, for fuller bibliography, Schneidmuller, Die Welfen, p. 24 and the literature he cites, n. 10.
20. Historia Welforum Weingartensis, ed. Ludwig Weiland, MGH SS 21 (Hanover, 1864), pp. 457–72. Schneidmu¨ller, Die Welfen, 24–26.
21. Geneologia Welforum, p. 733: “Eticho genuit filium Heinricum et filiam Hiltigardam. Hiltigardam Ludowicus Balbus inperator [sic] accepit uxorem. H[einricus] inperatori hominium facit; pater in Ambergov 12 monachos instituit et ibi obiit. Heinricus monachos Altemunster transtulit, unde eosWingarten, et dominas inde, que ibi erant, in Altenmunster transposuit. Heinricus Atham duxit uxorem et genuit sanctum Chunradum Constantiensem episcopum, Ethiconem et Rudolfum.” It continues: “Henry had moved the monks to Altomunster and then to Weingarten and the cannonesses, who had been there, he placed in Altomunster. Henry married Atha and sired Saint Conrad bishop of Constance, Eticho, and Rudolf.”
22. “Tempore Pii Lodowici inperatoris, filii Karoli Magni, extitit quidam de principibus Bawarorum, qui fuit binomius, nam et Eticho et Welfus dicebatur; cuius filiam nomine Iudith ipse Lodowicus post mortem Irmingardis inperatricis accepit in coniugium, genuitque ex ea Karolum cesarem Calvum, unde longa filiorum ac nepotum successione claruit regnum Francorum.” Annalista Saxo, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SS 6, (Hanover, 1844), p. 764.
23. In this regard, one thinks of the account in Dudo of St. Quintin wherein Rollo, when becoming the vassal of King Charles the Simple, refuses to kiss the king’s feet as part of the ritual of vassality. He orders one of his men to do it in his place. But this Viking grasps the king’s foot and raises it to his lips, thus causing the king to fall over backward—the submission of the duke comes at the cost of the humiliation of the king. Dudo, De Moribus et actis primorum Normanniae ducum, PL 141:650–51.
24. Historia Welforum Weingartensis, MGH SS 21, pp. 458–59.
25. Gerd Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt: Primus Verlag, 1997).
26. Pauline Stafford, “Charles the Bald, Judith and England,” in Margaret T. Gibson and Janet L. Nelson, eds., Charles the Bald, Court and Kingdom, 2nd rev. ed. (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1990), pp. 139–53. See also Janet L. Nelson’s comments in her translation of the Annals of St-Bertin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 83, n. 11.
27. Annals of St.-Bertin, a. 856, MGH: Annales Bertiniani, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SSRG i.u.s. 5 (Hanover, 1883), an. 856, p. 47. Nelson, Annals of St.Bertin, pp. 81–83.
28. Nelson, trans., Annals of St.-Bertin, an. 862, p. 97.
29. For example, Jean Dunbabin, France in the Making, 843–1180 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 69.
30. “Balduinum comitem, ipso lenocinante, et fratre suo Hludowico consentiente, mutato habitu est secuta.” Annales Bertiniani, MGH SSRG i.u.s. 5, pp. 56–57. Nelson, trans., Annales of St.-Bertin, p. 97. See also her remarks in Nelson, Charles the Bald (London: Longman, 1992), p. 203.
31. David Nicholas, Medieval Flanders (London: Longman, 1992), p. 17.
32. Nicholas, Medieval Flanders, pp. 17–18; Rosamond McKitterick, The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians, 751–987 (London: Longman, 1983), pp. 248–50.
33. Witger, Genealogia Arnulfi Comitis, ed. L. C. Bethmann, MGH SS 9, (Hanover, 1851), pp. 302–4. 34. On the relationship between the Carolingian genealogy and St. Bertin, see Helmut Reimitz, “Anleitung zur Interpretation: Schrift und Genealogie in der Karolingerzeit,” in Walter Pohl and Paul Herold, eds., Vom Nutzen des Schreibens, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 5 (Vienna: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2002), pp. 167–82, and esp. n. 45. Compare the Commemoratio genealogiae domni Karoli to the Flemish genealogy.
35. Witger, Genealogia, p. 303, “HIC INCIPIT SANCTA PROSAPIA DOMNI ARNULFI COMITIS GLORIOSSISSIMI FILIQUE EIUS BALDUINI QUOS DOMINUS IN HOC SECULO DIGNETUR PROTOGERE.”
36. “Quam Iudith prudentissimam ac spetiosam sociavit sibi Balduinus comes fortissimos in matrimonii conjugium. Ex qua genuit filium, inponens ei nomen sibi equivocum, videlicet Balduinum.” Ibid., p. 303.
37. On the importance of the Carolingian origin of the family to Witger, see Gert Melville, “Vorfahren und Vorga¨nger: Spa¨tmittelalterliche Genealogien als dynastische Legitimation zur Herrschaft,” in Peter-Johannes Schuler, ed., Die Familie als sozialer und historischer Verband: Untersuchungen zum Spatmittelalter und zur fruhen Neuzeit (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1987), pp. 203–309, esp. 267–69 and the literature there cited.
38. “Lidricus Harlebeccensis comes genuit Ingelrannum. Ingelrannus genuit Audacrum. Audacer genuit Balduinum Ferreum, qui duxit filiam Karoli Calvi nomine Judith.” Geneaologia comitum Flandriae Bertiana, MGH SS 9, p. 305.
39. “Balduinus Ferreus genuit Balduinum Calvum, qui duxit filiam Edgeri regis Anglorum, nominee Elftruden.” Ibid.
40. “Balduinus autem Ferreus genuit Balduinum Calvum ex Judith vidua Adelbaldi Regis Anglorum, filia videlicet Karoli Calvi regis Francorum. Hic prius eam duxerat, et anno eodem quo eam accepit, obit. Quo defuncto, Judith, possessionibus venditis, quas in Anglorum regno obtinuerat, ad patrem rediit, et Silvanectis, Sentliz sub tuitione paterna servabatur.” Lambert, Genealogia comitum Flandriae, MGH SS 9, p. 309.
41. “Anno igitur dominicae incarnationis 862 Balduinus Ferreus rapuit Judith, viduam Adelbaldi regis Anglorum et filiam Karoli Calvi regis Francorum” MGH SS 9, p. 317.
42. “...Iudith, qui comitem propter probitatem suam valde diligebat...” “Nicholaus autem videns eum iuventem pulcherrimum et probum...” Ibid.
43. See Karen S. Nicholas, “Countesses as Rulers in Flanders,” in Theodore Evergates, ed., Aristocratic Women in Medieval France, pp. 111–37.
By Patrick J. Geary in "Women at the Beginning" - Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary, Princeton University Press, Princeton/Oxford,2006, excerpts p.43-59. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa
If mythical women stood at the beginnings of origin legends, this may be because real flesh-and-blood women stood at the beginnings of great aristocratic families. After all, such families of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries largely owed their status, their lands, and their power to women. As Constance Bouchard and before her Karl Ferdinand Werner have pointed out, the great comital families might often appear to spring from “new men” in the ninth or tenth centuries, but actually these new men owed their rise to fortuitous marriages with greater, established families.1
Family chroniclers and genealogists were well aware of the importance of such marriages in preserving and augmenting family power and honor — it was a constant and essential element in generational strategies throughout the Middle Ages. As Anita Guerreau-Jalabert has argued, the image of a strictly agnatic descent through generations is more an invention of nineteenth-century genealogists than a reflection of medieval perceptions of kinship.2 At the same time, the question of how much credit for the successes of kindreds should be attributed to these women rather than to the men of the kindred remained very much in question. As Janet Nelson points out, elite women played a double symbolic role within their husbands’ lineages: first, they made possible the continuation of the lineage, but at the same time, because they did not themselves belong to it, they made possible the individualization of a particular offspring within the lineage.3 Thus reconstruction of family histories meant coming to terms, under differing needs and circumstances, with the relative importance of such marriages and of the women who put not only their dowries and their bodies but their personalities and kinsmen to work on behalf of their husbands and their children. Over time, the ideological imperative of illustrious male descent could best be fostered if memory of the women who made their rise possible was removed from center stage in favor of the audacious acts of men.
In the ninth century, two great families arose because of two women named Judith — a fortuitous name that recalled the widow who, during the siege of Jerusalem by the Assyrians, saves her city by pretending to offer herself to Holofernes only to behead him and return in triumph to her people.4 The biblical Judith was thus, as Heide Estes has pointed out, one of the few models of a woman playing an active role in public life available, although the reception of the story of Judith in the Middle Ages shows the dangerous ambiguity attached to this woman.5 The younger of the Judiths considered in this chapter was the grand-daughter of the elder, and their stories illustrate the two principal ways that women could be at the start of families’ fortunes. The story of how these beginnings were reformed over time suggests the complexities of aristocratic dynastic memory in the tenth through twelfth centuries.
Empress Judith
The Welfs are also one of the most precocious families in terms of their interest in their origins. Already in the early twelfth century, the family had a notion of their origins and identity in written form. By the end of the century, this family’s sense of its past was integral not only to its image of its contemporary power but also to its claims to royal power. First studied in a pioneering article by Karl Schmid in 1968,7 the Welfs and their genealogical literature have been a touchstone of subsequent investigations of the representation of genealogical consciousness in the medieval aristocracy.8 As a result, they are an ideal vehicle through which to examine an aristocratic family’s memory of the women who were largely responsible for its fortunes.
The first known Welf was already a powerful figure in the first half of the ninth century, characterized by the biographer of Louis the Pious, Thegan, as being “from the most noble kindred of the Bavarians.”9 This was not, however, exactly true. The eighth-century redaction of the Laws of the Bavarians lists the five most important ‘genealogiae or kindreds of the Bavarians whose status stood just below the ducal Agilufings. Welf and his family are not among them, although they may have already formed marriage alliances with some of these key Bavarian clans.10 One can more honestly conclude that they were a family on the rise, lacking the truly illustrious ancestry of the Agilufings or Huosi, but moving up in the new social order of the Carolingian world.11 They may have been relatively recently established in Bavaria, with deeper roots in Alemannia or in the old Frankish Austrasian heartland from which the Carolingians themselves had arisen.12 In any event, thisWelf himself had married Heilwig, a member of an aristocratic Saxon family.13 His kindred were clearly part of the great imperial aristocracy, with lands and power throughout the eastern portions of the Carolingian world. But the alliance that moved this kindred to the very center of the Frankish stage was the marriage of Judith, daughter ofWelf and Heilwig, to the emperor Louis the Pious in 819, following the death of Louis’s first wife, Irmingard. Judith, according to the Annales regni Francorum and the account of an anonymous biographer of Louis known as the Astronomer, was selected in a sort of beauty pageant, in which the emperor examined daughters of the nobility before making his choice, a practice some have seen as imitating Byzantine tradition.14 More recently, Mayke de Jong has pointed out that this description, and particularly that of the “Astronomer,” is less a reflection of Byzantine court tradition than an image of Judith modeled on the biblical figure of Esther, a comparison already made by Hrabanus Maurus in his defense of the empress.15 Certainly Louis was not simply choosing a beauty queen: he was allying himself with Judith’s father and his family. That this marriage was such an alliance is demonstrated by a second royal marriage that shortly followed. Sometime between 825 and 827, Hemma, the sister of the Empress Judith, married the emperor’s son by his first marriage, Louis the German, king in East Francia and Bavaria. Finally, Konrad the Elder, brother of Judith and Hemma, married Adelheid, the sister-in-law of Louis the Pious’s son Lothar I. The marriage of Judith thus marked the ultimate achievement of a great family — an unprecedented alliance with the Carolingians — and the start of ever closer relations with the royal house.
As mother of Charles the Bald, Judith played a more active, public role than any previous Carolingian queen, intervening on behalf of her favorites and devoting her energies to assuring the future of her son. She was also the channel for imperial favor, which allowed her brothers and other relations to win offices and lands from the king, both in the West Frankish kingdom of Charles and more widely in Alemannia, Bavaria, Raetia, Burgundy, and Lothringia. One relative acquired control over the most important monasteries in West Francia, while others established their power over Auxerre, Sens, St. Maurice d’Agaune, Jumieges, St. Riquier, and Valenciennes. Judith was no passive figure in the reign of her husband and soon became the target of the hatred and aggression launched by Louis’s older sons in response to his desires to carve out a kingdom for Charles the Bald.16
As the Carolingian Empire fragmented, most of the near-term advantages gained by the Welfs proved short-lived, although one grand-nephew of Judith, Rudolf, attained the kingship of Burgundy in 888 and established a kingdom that endured for several generations. Elsewhere, particularly in Swabia, the Welfs kept a lower profile but continued to consolidate their lands and especially their relationships with important monastic foundations.17
A woman thus played a crucial role in the origin and destiny of theWelfs. Judith, through her marriage and through her continuing influence on her husband, established the foundations, however discontinuous, that would allow the Welfs in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to return to the center of the European stage. While in the post-Carolingian period the family retained lands and local power in Swabia, the Welfs disappeared from imperial and royal power, although they gradually built their lordship around Altdorf/Ravensburg and demanded ducal status in competition with the Staufer. Around 1120, a second Welf Judith wed Duke Frederick II of Swabia in an attempt to put an end to these great families’ rivalry. She bore Frederick Barbarossa, who, although celebrated as the “cornerstone” to end the conflicts between the two families, ultimately continued the conflict with Henry the Lion as the representative of the great ducal family.
The Welfs took a precocious interest in their family history, being among the first nonroyal families whose origins and genealogies were recorded in their house monasteries, presumably drawing on both written records and family memories and focusing on the formal, liturgical memoria of family members. The result is the existence of three twelfth-century genealogical accounts of the family’s origins and history that allow us to see how Judith was remembered within the family. The earliest, the Genealogia Welforum, was written in the Swabian monastery of Weingarten sometime before the death of Duke Henry the Black of Bavaria in 1126.18 The second, the so-called Saxon Welf source is now lost in its original form but can be reconstructed from later texts, in particular a supplement to the Saxon World Chronicle composed in the 1130s at St. Michael’s monastery at Lüneberg, which represents a Saxon version of Welf memory.19 The third is the Historia Welforum Weingartensis, produced around 1170 in upper Swabia.20 Together these three texts allow one to follow the reflections of various members of the Welf kindred across time as they reflect on their origins and the relative importance of their ancestors in securing their power and status.
The authors of these three texts do not ignore women in the history of the family. Marriage alliances and mothers of significant Welfs are regularly reported. And yet, while these women are present, their presence and their importance is strictly circumscribed, even undercut, by the manner in which they are treated. This is particularly true for the woman whose marriage and subsequent role was paramount for the Welf family, the first Judith, wife of Louis the Pious.
The first record of the Welf family history distorts and undermines the role of the pivotal Judith. First, Judith herself has disappeared entirely. Although the typology of the Judith story remains, it is a fictional one. The laconic Genealogia records simply: “Eticho sired a son Henry and a daughter Hiltigard. The Emperor Louis the Stammerer received Hiltigard as wife. Henry made himself the man of the Emperor. His father established twelve monks in Ammergau and there he died.”21 In this earliest version of a family origin myth, all memory of the great figures of the ninth century, including Judith and her father Welf, thus disappear in favor of a legend that ties the origin of the family to a relatively obscure Swabian noble and a marriage that never took place.
The second text, written in Saxony and drawing no doubt on Carolingian historiography, restores Judith to the story (and likewise the first Welf, here given the double name Eticho Welf, indicating that in the oral traditions within the kindred the memory of Eticho remained powerful). And yet, this time Judith’s role is undercut in yet another manner. In this account, the Eticho Welf is the father of Judith, “whom Louis [the Pious] took in marriage after the death of Empress Irmingarde and of whom he begot Caesar Charles the Bald.”22 Notice how passive Judith appears in this description: she is taken as wife and of her is generated Charles. She does make an important contribution to the future of the Welf family, however, by counseling her brother to become the vassal of Louis. But this counsel splits her family and could have destroyed their honor. Her father, Welf, is characterized as a prince of highest freedom who would never submit to anyone for a fief, even to the emperor, and orders his son Henry to refuse as well. However Henry, “by the persuasion of his sister Judith” agreed to become the vassal of Louis for a fief of the size that he could circumnavigate at noon with a plow. Welf was said to be so opposed to his daughter’s proposition, tantamount to abandoning the family’s freedom and honor, that he left Bavaria with twelve followers and lived out the remainder of his life in self-imposed exile with them in the area of Scharnitzwald, never again to see his son or his daughter.
Ultimately Henry triumphed, but he did so not through the marriage of his sister with Louis but in spite of it — through his own cleverness (caliditate sua). Concealing a small golden plow on his person, and setting out in advance relays of fresh horses at regular intervals, he set off at a furious pace while the emperor was taking his noonday nap and quickly rode around a vast amount of territory. When the emperor awoke, Henry demanded that he honor his bargain and invest him with the enormous territory that he had claimed. Louis was indignant that he had been tricked, but remembering his promise, had no choice but to grant Henry this vast territory, which formed the core of the Welf’s lands in the future.
The story of “Henry of the Golden Plow” both writes Judith into the memory of the Welf’s first rise to prominence and at the same time minimizes her role in this rise. Her marriage to Louis is important, but from the perspective of the anonymous Saxon annalist, it is also fraught with danger. Rather than promoting the interests of her family, she urges their subservience to her husband. Only Henry’s cleverness prevents, or perhaps mitigates, this dishonor. True, he is still the vassal of the emperor, but he is also lord of a vast territory that he has won, not through his sister’s intervention, but through trickery. Having been able to dupe his lord, his position as vassal is hardly one of humble obedience.23 Henry has in a sense triumphed not only over Louis but over his sister as well.
Subsequently, Judith remains in the family’s memory, but not a principal actor in its history. In the Historia Welforum, and representing, as Karl Schmid showed, tradition of the upper Swabian Welf court, Judith’s role is entirely marginal:
"Welf sired a son named Eticho and a daughter Judith. Louis the emperor, known as the Pious, took this Judith as wife after the death of his wife Irmingard, from whom he had produced three sons, Lothar, Pipin and Louis. From her he sired Charles the Bald, who obtained the kingdom of the Franks in the division of the empire, and who ruled strenuously for forty-five years while his brothers Lothar and Louis reigned in Italy and in Alemannia, after the third brother, Pipin, had died".24
In this version, then, Eticho is the son of Welf and the brother of Judith. The opportunity to become the vassal of the emperor does not arise in this generation at all, but in the next. Eticho in turn sires Henry and, when his son swears fealty to the emperor, retires to the forest and founds the monastery of Amberg. Judith has no role at all in the events leading up to the land acquisition and thus the foundation of the Swabian Welfs’ territorial lordship.
Judith of Flanders
Normally, when such a marriage took place, it was part of a negotiation with the higher-status family: a daughter given in marriage could be a reward for past support as well as a guarantee of support in the future. But this was not always the case. In the most dramatic case of the ninth century, the similarly named grand-daughter of the Empress Judith brought the family of the counts of Flanders into royal proximity but in a striking way: the Count of Flanders eloped with Judith, the daughter of Charles the Bald, risking all to achieve an alliance, however unwilling, with the royal family.
The story is dramatic and complex. Judith had been married twice previously. Her first marriage in 856, when she was about twelve years old, had been arranged by her father and was a calculated match of royal strategy. Charles gave her to King Æthelwulf of Wessex (reigned 839–58), a powerful warrior king who had been widowed and was on the Continent returning from a pilgrimage to Rome when he and Charles met and contracted the marriage. The union came at a moment of internal and external danger for the Carolingian. Western counts, angered by Charles’s grants to his son Louis the Stammerer of important parts of Neustria, had revolted, rallying around his other son, Charles of Aquitaine. At the same time, Viking raiders, possibly in coordination with the rebels, sailed up the Seine and plundered the cities, monasteries, and estates. Charles the Bald probably hoped that this alliance with theWessex dynasty would bring him assistance against both of these threats.26
In any event, he saw to it that following the marriage Archbishop Hincmar of Reims consecrated and crowned Judith, and his new son-in-law, contrary to West Saxon tradition, conferred on her the title of queen.27 King Æthelwulf died shortly after, and his successor and son by a previous marriage, King Æthelbald, hoping to maintain the alliance, immediately married his stepmother. This alliance proved ephemeral as well: Æthelbald died in 860. The twice-widowed Judith then returned to the Continent, where her father sent her to Senlis, according to the Chronicle of St. Bertin, “under his protection and royal and episcopal guardianship, with all the honour due to a queen, until such time as, if she could not remain chaste, she might marry in the way the apostle said, that is suitably and legally.”28 Presumably, Charles was waiting to arrange another advantageous marriage for his daughter. However, the royal and episcopal guardians must not have been very vigilant: Judith ran off with Baldwin, a count whose county included at that time merely a narrow band along the coast from Bruges to the mouth of the River Aa.
Generally, Baldwin is credited with the initiative in this audacious gamble, and no doubt this is largely true.29 However, as Janet Nelson has pointed out, the most comprehensive contemporary source, the Annals of St. Bertin, make Judith the actor in the elopement, not simply the passive victim of bride theft: “Charles now learned that she had changed her widow’s clothing and gone off with Count Baldwin, at his instigation and with her brother Louis’s consent.”30 This description suggests that Baldwin was acting in alliance with Louis, and one may presume that Judith was the reward for Baldwin’s support. However, the way that the Annals describe Judith’s own role suggest that perhaps, after two previous forced marriages, although only sixteen-years-old, the queen may have been ready to take her fate in her hands, seeking out a match that would remove her from the role of pawn in her father’s political strategies and provide her with greater personal autonomy than would a marriage with another king.
It was a dangerous gamble: her father was furious—at Baldwin, at Judith, and no doubt at Louis. At his demand, Pope Nicholas I excommunicated the couple. Baldwin and Judith rushed to Rome and brought their cause directly to the pontiff. In time they managed to convince him to rescind the excommunication and even to intervene on their behalf with Charles. After two years, urged by the pope and pressured by the Viking chief who controlled Frisia, Charles finally accepted the elopement as a fait accompli and permitted Judith to marry the count. As Baldwin had hoped, the royal marriage alliance brought with it more than just a bride. He received from Charles the county of Flanders (a smaller area than the Flanders of the High Middle Ages), and in time Ternois, the area of Waas, and the lay abbacy of St. Pieter of Ghent.31 Baldwin proved a fairly faithful vassal to Charles, although he carefully maintained his relations with Charles’s son, who had defied his father by countenancing the elopement and marriage in the first place.
Shortly after Baldwin’s death in 879, his son Baldwin II was forced to flee a furious Viking onslaught, abandoning most of his lands. Although he married Aelfthryth, the daughter of King Alfred the Great, he seems to have been willing to cooperate with the Danes when advantageous, only going on the offense when they left the region. Gradually Baldwin II managed to reconquer his paternal inheritance and even expand his holdings, establishing his countship over an enlarged “Flanders” that included not only the pagi of Ghent and Waas but Mempisc, Courtrai, the Ijzer, Ternois, Boulonnais, and much of the Tournaisis.32 By his death in 918, he had created an extensive territorial principality independent of royal control.
In a real sense, then, Baldwin II might be seen as the founder of the family’s fortunes. Initially, however, his parents’ marriage loomed large in the memories of the descendants of Baldwin and Judith as the foundation story of the dynasty. The earliest account, written by Witger between 951 and 959 and preserved in the great Flemish monastery of St. Bertin, emphasizes the royal descent of the family through Judith.33 It begins with a genealogy of the Carolingians to the children of Charles the Simple, derived from the Genealogia Fontanellensi.34 Then its rubrics announce, “Here begins the holy race of the most glorious lord Count Arnulf [I “The Great” 918–65] and his son Baldwin [III,d. 962], whom the Lord deign to protect in this world.”35 The genealogy then starts, not with Baldwin I, but with Judith, who had been introduced in the previous, Carolingian genealogy as the daughter of Charles the Bald and Ermentrudis: “Which most prudent and beautiful Judith the most powerful Count Baldwin joined to himself in the bonds of matrimony.” It then continues, “From her he engendered a son, bestowing on him the same name as his own, that is Baldwin.”36 Nothing is said of Judith’s status as an Anglo-Saxon queen, only as a Carolingian. Baldwin II’s marriage is recorded, but not the name of his wife Aelfthryth or her father Alfred, only that she was “from the most noble race of the trans-maritime kingdom.” Nor is anything said of Baldwin I’s own parentage. He emerges only with his marriage to the royal family, a relationship emphasized later in the genealogy when, recounting Arnulf ’s pious donations, he reminds his readers that the monastery of Saint-Corneille in Compie`gne to which he was particularly generous “had been founded by his great-great-grandfather Charles the Bald.” Clearly, it was Judith whom Witger wished to emphasize as he recounted the origins of the counts. For Witger, the comital family began with the marriage of Judith and Baldwin. In the tenth century, the family’s Carolingian origins were clearly at the center of their dynastic concerns, and Judith was their source.37
By the early twelfth century, when the second Flemish genealogy was written at St. Bertin, the family no longer began with Judith and her marriage to Baldwin. Judith is still present and still the daughter of Charles the Bald, but the family’s origins start two generations earlier with one Lidricus, count of Harlebeke. He in turn was the father of Ingelram, the father of Audacer, who is said to be the father of Baldwin.38 These shadowy figures from the first half of the ninth century certainly existed, although what their relationship to each other was and whether they were indeed the ancestors of Baldwin is quite uncertain. What matters for the genealogist is that Baldwin was not the first of his lineage, and thus his marriage did not create the family. Nor is his marriage with Judith particularly emphasized in the text. His is but the first of a series of marriages with royalty. The marriage of Baldwin II is described in exactly the same terms as that of his father, even if the author erred both on the name of the Anglo-Saxon king and his daughter: “Audacer begat Baldwin Iron Arm who married the daughter of Charles the Bald by name Judith. Baldwin Iron Arm begat Baldwin the Bald, who married the daughter of King Edger of the English, by name Elftruda.”39 Nor are these royal marriages the last enumerated by the anonymous author: Arnulf II (965–88) married Rozela Susanne, daughter of King Berengar of Lombardy, and Baldwin V (1037–67) married Adela, daughter of King Robert II of France. However, none of these royal unions is particularly favored or emphasized. It is rather the cumulative effect of these brilliant marriages that carries forward the comital family.
Around 1120, Lambert of Saint Omer included in his encyclopedic compendium, the Liber Floridus, a genealogy of the counts of Flanders that expanded on the received tradition and reincorporated information on Judith from the Annals of St. Bertin. In his account, in 792, during the reign of Charlemagne, Lidricus, the count of Harlebeke, found the region of Flanders deserted and occupied it. Lambert then writes that Lidricus begat Ingelram, and Ingelram in turn begat Audricus/Audacer, the father of Baldwin I “Ferreus.” He then continues:
"Baldwin begat Baldwin the Bald from Judith, the widow of Adelbald king of the Angles, the daughter of Charles the Bald, king of the Franks. He [Adelbald] however died before taking her away as wife in the same year that he had accepted her. After his death, Judith, selling her possessions that she had obtained in the kingdom of the English, returned to her father and was being watched over under paternal guardianship at Senlis".40
Lambert then goes on to cite the story of her flight and marriage to Baldwin in a verbatim citation from the Annals of St. Bertin, as well as the story of the seduction, the excommunication of the couple, their appeal to Pope Nicholas, and his eventual reconciliation of the king to his daughter and Baldwin.
As in the St. Bertin genealogy, the marriage of Baldwin and Judith is the first of a series of royal marriages uniting counts of Flanders with royal families. Lambert retained the language of the St. Bertin Annals, Judith is still active in the affair, but she is not part of the foundation legend of the family. Rather, her enticement by Baldwin is paralleled by the seizure, two generations earlier, of Flanders by Count Lidricus of Harlebeke. It is this mythical figure who, in seizing what he wants from under the nose of Charlemagne, prefigures the audacity of Baldwin Iron Arm who seizes Charlemagne’s great-granddaughter from under the nose of her father.
A final, even more elaborate genealogical account of the Flemish counts was written sometime after 1160. This text, the Flandria generosa, expands still further on the account in Lambert. Here, however, the action is clear: “In the year 862 Baldwin Iron Arm abducted Judith, widow of Adelbald, king of the English and daughter of Charles the Bald, king of the Franks.”41 The remainder of the account is virtually the same as that in Lambert and thus in the Annals, but interpolations in an early manuscript emphasize the obvious point that the abduction is all about Baldwin: Judith is said to have loved the count greatly on account of his “probitas,” which might ironically be translated “uprightness.” The pope is said to have agreed to intervene upon meeting Baldwin and seeing that he was “a very handsome young man and upright.”42
As in Lambert, the story told in Flandria generosa of Baldwin’s audacious marriage is no longer about Judith and certainly not the foundation story of the family. It is but one in a series of remarkable successes by this family of audacious and successful counts, who before and after Baldwin Iron Arm display the virtues of their “true” beginning, those of Lidricus.
Baldwin was no doubt quite a capable figure: had he not have been, Judith and her brother would certainly have chosen someone else as husband. However, what we see in the story of Baldwin and Judith is how the initial recognition of the foundation of the comital family made possible by a royal marriage fades as the male members of the family before and after are used to demonstrate a tradition of royal marriages and audacious deeds. Judith is no longer, as she was in the tenth century, the beginning of the family. She is but one more Carolingian property seized by a bold member of the Flemish dynasty.
And yet, this progressive erasure of Judith is anything but a simple reflection of the progressive marginalization of Flemish countesses during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Quite the opposite is true.43 Even while Judith was being reduced to one more clever conquest, a series of powerful countesses were playing active and critical roles in the governance of the county. In the eleventh century, Richtilde, the widow of Count Baldwin VI, fought to protect the rights of her sons Arnulf and Baldwin from their half-brother Robert the Frisian. Robert II’s powerful wife Clementia of Burgundy, sister of Pope Calixtus II, shared power in Flanders with her son Baldwin following Robert’s death in 1111. Sybil of Anjou, the second wife of Count Thierry, helped bring her husband into the patronage of King Henry II of England and twice served as regent while Thierry was at the Crusades, before accompanying him to Jerusalem and entering the convent of Saint-Lazarus at Bethany. These three women were just some of the powerful countesses in Flanders, who numbered among the most active, and at times most problematic, figures in Flemish history. One might see the effacement of Judith in genealogical memory as a critical response to, rather than a reflection of, women and power in the county.
The fates of the two Judiths in dynastic memory demonstrates both the vital importance of women in weaving the generations of a family and the strict limits to these women’s roles. Daughters of kings or wives of kings brought enormous prestige and the chance for honors and riches to their male kindred both in their lifetimes and beyond. Both the Welfs and the Flemish counts long cherished and cultivated stories of their illustrious ancestry and close relationship with the Carolingian dynasty cemented through their Judiths. And yet, as time passed, one senses a reticence to attribute this good fortune to these founding mothers.
Henry of the Golden Plow, far from obtaining honor from his wife, was tempted by her to cast the honor and liberty of his family aside and managed, only through his own cleverness, to triumph. Lidricus, the mythical ancestor of the counts of Flanders, likewise managed to acquire his vast lands from the Carolingians, not as dowry or favor but through trickery. And ultimately Baldwin Iron Arm managed, by seducing Judith, to obtain his relationship to the king in spite of the latter.
In the ninth-century texts, both Judiths were participants in the fates of their husbands, but this too disappeared across the generations. The Judiths, like other women whose marriages made and sustained these families, were less participants in the rise of their husbands’ fortunes than they were archetypal booty — among the first possessions that their husbands would acquire. Such was certainly not a description of these women at the origins of these families, nor was it an accurate description of the women who came after them, but it was the way that those responsible for family memory wished that they were.
Just why men might wish that women were less prominent in the origins and identities of their kindreds can perhaps be glimpsed by considering the effects on gender balance in the most important genealogy in the West, that of the family of Jesus.
Notes
1. For example, the house of Anjou, which Karl Ferdinand Werner traces to the marriage of Ingelgarius, father of Fulk the Red, and Adelais, a member of the powerful Widonen clan, which launched the fortunes of the family in Brittany and Anjou. Karl Ferdinand Werner, “Untersuchungen zur Fruhzeit des franzosischen Furstentums (9.–10. Jahrhundert),” Die Welt als Geschichte 18 (1958): 264–79. Bernard Bachrach has attempted unconvincingly to refine Werner’s research in “Some Observations on the Origins of the Angevin Dynasty,” Medieval Prosopography 10 (1989): 1–24, which he repeats in Fulk Nerra, the Neo-Roman Consul, 987–1040: A Political Biography of the Angevin Count (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 1–4, but see Christian Settipani, “Les comtes d’Anjou et leurs alliances aux Xe et XIe siecles,” in K.S.B. Keats-Rohan, ed., Family Trees and the Roots of Politics: The Prosopography of Britain and France from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge, UK:Boydell Press, 1997), pp. 211–69, esp. pp. 212–18. On other such families, see Constance Brittain Bouchard, Those of My Blood, esp. pp. 22–38.
2. Anita Guerreau-Jalabert, “Sur les structures de parente dans l’Europe medievale,” Annales ESC 36 (1981), 1028–49; and “La parente dans l’Europe medievale et moderne: A propos d’une synthese recente,” L’Homme 110 (1989): 69–93.
3. Nelson, “Perceptions du pouvoir chez les historiennes du haute moyen age,” in La femme au moyen-age, p. 79.
4. The Book of Judith is not part of the Hebrew Bible and thus is counted among the apocrypha. Jerome included it in the Vulgate although the text from which he translated it differs greatly from the Septuagint version.
5. On the ambiguities of Judith in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, see Heide Estes, “Feasting with Holofernes,” Exemplaria 15 (2003): 325–50. On the continental receptions of Judith in relationship to the wife of Louis the Pious, see Elizabeth Ward, “Caesar’s Wife: The Career of the Empress Judith, 819–829,” in Peter Godman and Roger Collins, eds., Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious (814–840) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp.205–27, esp. 222.
6. On the Welfs, see in general Bernd Schneidmu¨ller, Die Welfen: Herrschaft und Errinerung (819–1252) (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2000).
7. Karl Schmid, “Welfisches Selbstverstandnis,” in J. Fleckenstein and Karl Schmid, eds., Adel und Kirche: Gerd Tellenbach um 65. Geburtstag (Freiburg:Herder, 1968), pp. 389–416.
8. Especially the studies of Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Die ‘sachsische Welfenquelle’ als Zeugnis der welfischen Hausu¨berlieferung,” Deutsches Archiv 24 (1968): 435–97; Oexle, “Welfische Memoria: Zugleich ein Beitrag uber adlige Hausuberlieferung und die Kriterien ihrer Erforschung,” in Bernd Schneidmuller, ed., Die Welfen und ihr Braunschweiger Hof im hohen Mittelalter (Wiesbaden:Harrossowitz, 1995), pp. 61–94; and among the studies of Bernd Schneidmuller, especially “Landesherrschaft, welfische Indentitat und Gruppen im deutschen Mittelalter,” in Peter Moraw, ed., Regionale Identitat und soziale Gruppen im deutschen Mittelalter, Zeitschrift fur historische Forschung, Beiheft 14 (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1992), pp. 65–101. However, the extent to which the kin of Welf and his daughter Judith formed a cohesive party in the ninth century can be exaggerated. See Janet L. Nelson, Charles the Bald (London: Longman, 1992), pp. 177–80.
9. Thegan, Gesta Hludowici imperatoris, ed. Ernst Tremp., MGH SSRG i.u.s. 64 (Hanover, 1995), c. 26, p. 214. See Schmid, “Welfisches Selbstverstandnis,” n. 12.
10. Lex Baiwariorum, 3.1. “De genealogia qui vocantur Hosi, Drazza Fagana Hahilinga Anniona isti sunt quasi primi post Agilolfingos qui sunt de genere ducali,” ed. Ernst von Schwind, MGH Leges nationum Germanicarum, sec. 1, vol. 5, part 2 (Hanover, 1926), pp. 312–13. Wolfgang Metz, “Heinrich mit dem goldenen Wagen,” in Blatter fur deutsche Landesgeschichte 107 (1971): 136–61, esp. 148, suggests a connection with the Huosi and other leading Bavarian families. This may be the case, but one should not read the list of Bavarian kindreds as a fixed, exclusive identity. See Karl Brunner, Oppositionelle Gruppen im Karolingerreich, Veroffentlichungen des Instituts fur osterreichische Geschichtsforschung 25 (Vienna: Hermann Bohlaus Nach, 1979), esp. pp. 102–3.
11. Silvia Konecny, “Eherecht und Ehepolitik unter Ludwig dem Frommen,” Mitteilungen des Instituts fur osterreichische Geschichtsforschung 85 (1977): 1– 21, esp. 15.
12. Bernd Schneidmuller, “Landesherrschaft, welfische Identitat und sachsiche Geshichte,” in Peter Moraw, ed., Regionale Identitat und soziale Gruppen im deutschen Mittelalter, Zeitschrift fur historische Forschung, Beiheft 14 (Berlin:Duncker and Humblot, 1992), pp. 65–101.
13. Thegan, Gesta Hludowici imperatoris, MGH SSRG i.u.s., 64, c. 26, p. 214.
14. Annales regni Francorum, ed. Friderich Kurze, MGH SSRG i.u.s. 6 (Hanover, 1895), an. 819, p. 150: “Imperator inspectis plerisque nobilium filiabus Huelpi comitis filiam nomine Iudith duxit uxorem.” Astronomus, Vita Hludowici imperatoris, ed. Ernst Tremp, MGH SSRG i.u.s. 64 (Hanover, 1995), p. 32. See Brunner, Oppositionelle Gruppen, p. 102; Egon Boshof, Ludwig der Fromme (Darmstadt: Primus, 1996), p. 152.
15. Hrabanus Maurus, Epistolae, no. 17a, ed. Ernst Dummler, MGH Epistolae 5 (Berlin, 1899), pp. 420–21. See Mayke de Jong, “Bride Shows Revisited: Praise, Slander and Exegesis in the Reign of the Empress Judith,” in Leslie Brubaker and Julia M. H. Smith, eds., Gender in the Early Medieval World, pp.257–77.
16. And she paid the price of being branded an adulteress. Genevieve Buhrer-Thierry, “La reine adultere,” Cahiers de Civilisation Medievale 35 (1992): 299–312. See also Pauline Stafford, Queens, Concubines, and Dowagers:The King’s Wife in the Early Middle Ages (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), esp. pp. 18–20 and 83; Elizabeth Ward, “Agobard of Lyons and Paschasius Radbertus as Critics of the Empress Judith,” in W. J. Sheils and D. Wood, eds., Women in the Church, Studies in Church History 27 (Oxford:Blackwell, 1990), pp. 15–25;Ward, “Caesar’s Wife”; and de Jong, “Bride Shows Revisited,” p. 262.
17. Generally on theWelfs in the later ninth century, see Schneidmuller, Die Welfen, pp. 58–72.
18. GeneologiaWelforum, ed. Georg Pertz, MGH SS 13 (Hanover, 1881), pp. 733–34. See also Oexle, “Welfische Memoria.”
19. Sa¨chsische Weltchronik, ed. Ludwig Weiland, MGH Deutsche Chroniken 2 (Hanover, 1877), pp. 1–384. See also Oexle, “‘Die sachsische Welfenquelle’”; and Oexle, “Bischof Konrad von Konstanz in der Erinnerung der Welfen und der welfischen Hausuberlieferung wahrend des 12. Jahrhunderts,” Freiburger Diozesan-Archiv 95 (1975): 7–40; and, for fuller bibliography, Schneidmuller, Die Welfen, p. 24 and the literature he cites, n. 10.
20. Historia Welforum Weingartensis, ed. Ludwig Weiland, MGH SS 21 (Hanover, 1864), pp. 457–72. Schneidmu¨ller, Die Welfen, 24–26.
21. Geneologia Welforum, p. 733: “Eticho genuit filium Heinricum et filiam Hiltigardam. Hiltigardam Ludowicus Balbus inperator [sic] accepit uxorem. H[einricus] inperatori hominium facit; pater in Ambergov 12 monachos instituit et ibi obiit. Heinricus monachos Altemunster transtulit, unde eosWingarten, et dominas inde, que ibi erant, in Altenmunster transposuit. Heinricus Atham duxit uxorem et genuit sanctum Chunradum Constantiensem episcopum, Ethiconem et Rudolfum.” It continues: “Henry had moved the monks to Altomunster and then to Weingarten and the cannonesses, who had been there, he placed in Altomunster. Henry married Atha and sired Saint Conrad bishop of Constance, Eticho, and Rudolf.”
22. “Tempore Pii Lodowici inperatoris, filii Karoli Magni, extitit quidam de principibus Bawarorum, qui fuit binomius, nam et Eticho et Welfus dicebatur; cuius filiam nomine Iudith ipse Lodowicus post mortem Irmingardis inperatricis accepit in coniugium, genuitque ex ea Karolum cesarem Calvum, unde longa filiorum ac nepotum successione claruit regnum Francorum.” Annalista Saxo, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SS 6, (Hanover, 1844), p. 764.
23. In this regard, one thinks of the account in Dudo of St. Quintin wherein Rollo, when becoming the vassal of King Charles the Simple, refuses to kiss the king’s feet as part of the ritual of vassality. He orders one of his men to do it in his place. But this Viking grasps the king’s foot and raises it to his lips, thus causing the king to fall over backward—the submission of the duke comes at the cost of the humiliation of the king. Dudo, De Moribus et actis primorum Normanniae ducum, PL 141:650–51.
24. Historia Welforum Weingartensis, MGH SS 21, pp. 458–59.
25. Gerd Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt: Primus Verlag, 1997).
26. Pauline Stafford, “Charles the Bald, Judith and England,” in Margaret T. Gibson and Janet L. Nelson, eds., Charles the Bald, Court and Kingdom, 2nd rev. ed. (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1990), pp. 139–53. See also Janet L. Nelson’s comments in her translation of the Annals of St-Bertin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 83, n. 11.
27. Annals of St.-Bertin, a. 856, MGH: Annales Bertiniani, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SSRG i.u.s. 5 (Hanover, 1883), an. 856, p. 47. Nelson, Annals of St.Bertin, pp. 81–83.
28. Nelson, trans., Annals of St.-Bertin, an. 862, p. 97.
29. For example, Jean Dunbabin, France in the Making, 843–1180 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 69.
30. “Balduinum comitem, ipso lenocinante, et fratre suo Hludowico consentiente, mutato habitu est secuta.” Annales Bertiniani, MGH SSRG i.u.s. 5, pp. 56–57. Nelson, trans., Annales of St.-Bertin, p. 97. See also her remarks in Nelson, Charles the Bald (London: Longman, 1992), p. 203.
31. David Nicholas, Medieval Flanders (London: Longman, 1992), p. 17.
32. Nicholas, Medieval Flanders, pp. 17–18; Rosamond McKitterick, The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians, 751–987 (London: Longman, 1983), pp. 248–50.
33. Witger, Genealogia Arnulfi Comitis, ed. L. C. Bethmann, MGH SS 9, (Hanover, 1851), pp. 302–4. 34. On the relationship between the Carolingian genealogy and St. Bertin, see Helmut Reimitz, “Anleitung zur Interpretation: Schrift und Genealogie in der Karolingerzeit,” in Walter Pohl and Paul Herold, eds., Vom Nutzen des Schreibens, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 5 (Vienna: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2002), pp. 167–82, and esp. n. 45. Compare the Commemoratio genealogiae domni Karoli to the Flemish genealogy.
35. Witger, Genealogia, p. 303, “HIC INCIPIT SANCTA PROSAPIA DOMNI ARNULFI COMITIS GLORIOSSISSIMI FILIQUE EIUS BALDUINI QUOS DOMINUS IN HOC SECULO DIGNETUR PROTOGERE.”
36. “Quam Iudith prudentissimam ac spetiosam sociavit sibi Balduinus comes fortissimos in matrimonii conjugium. Ex qua genuit filium, inponens ei nomen sibi equivocum, videlicet Balduinum.” Ibid., p. 303.
37. On the importance of the Carolingian origin of the family to Witger, see Gert Melville, “Vorfahren und Vorga¨nger: Spa¨tmittelalterliche Genealogien als dynastische Legitimation zur Herrschaft,” in Peter-Johannes Schuler, ed., Die Familie als sozialer und historischer Verband: Untersuchungen zum Spatmittelalter und zur fruhen Neuzeit (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1987), pp. 203–309, esp. 267–69 and the literature there cited.
38. “Lidricus Harlebeccensis comes genuit Ingelrannum. Ingelrannus genuit Audacrum. Audacer genuit Balduinum Ferreum, qui duxit filiam Karoli Calvi nomine Judith.” Geneaologia comitum Flandriae Bertiana, MGH SS 9, p. 305.
39. “Balduinus Ferreus genuit Balduinum Calvum, qui duxit filiam Edgeri regis Anglorum, nominee Elftruden.” Ibid.
40. “Balduinus autem Ferreus genuit Balduinum Calvum ex Judith vidua Adelbaldi Regis Anglorum, filia videlicet Karoli Calvi regis Francorum. Hic prius eam duxerat, et anno eodem quo eam accepit, obit. Quo defuncto, Judith, possessionibus venditis, quas in Anglorum regno obtinuerat, ad patrem rediit, et Silvanectis, Sentliz sub tuitione paterna servabatur.” Lambert, Genealogia comitum Flandriae, MGH SS 9, p. 309.
41. “Anno igitur dominicae incarnationis 862 Balduinus Ferreus rapuit Judith, viduam Adelbaldi regis Anglorum et filiam Karoli Calvi regis Francorum” MGH SS 9, p. 317.
42. “...Iudith, qui comitem propter probitatem suam valde diligebat...” “Nicholaus autem videns eum iuventem pulcherrimum et probum...” Ibid.
43. See Karen S. Nicholas, “Countesses as Rulers in Flanders,” in Theodore Evergates, ed., Aristocratic Women in Medieval France, pp. 111–37.
By Patrick J. Geary in "Women at the Beginning" - Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary, Princeton University Press, Princeton/Oxford,2006, excerpts p.43-59. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa