St. Adelaide of Burgundy, 932 - 999

 St. Adelaide of Burgundy, 932 - 999

Mother of several kingdoms

Daughter of Rudolph II king of Burgundy and Bertha of Swabia, consort to Lothair II, King of Italy, secondly to Otto I “the Great”, Holy Roman Emperor. Adelaide educated at the court of Pavia and was at the center of the political scene and perhaps the most prominent European woman of the tenth century; daughter, sister, and aunt of three consecutive kings of Burgundy, sister-in-law, mother-in-law, and grandmother to three consecutive kings of France, and wife, mother, and grandmother to three Ottonian emperors.

In 950, three years after their marriage, Lothair was poisoned by a rival for the Italian crown. Adelaide ruled alone until the following year when she refused to marry the murder’s son and became the center of a struggle for the Italian crown, imprisoned and treated brutally. After four months of captivity she managed to escape through a secret tunnel she and her companions had dug and made her way north to the castle of Canossa, sending a plea for help to emperor Otto I of the Holy Roman Empire. A beautiful woman of strong character there were many willing to help but when Otto received the message he quickly responded leading an army from Germany down to Italy, defeated the murder in battle and freed Adelaide taking her back to Germany were they were married in 951 and she crowned empress, enabling her to exert a visible influence in Italian politics. Otto also added additional lands to the lands she brought into the marriage to make Adelaide more financially independent .

When Otto died in 973, she became regent for her son Otto II who included her in his decrees and after arriving at decisions would state "with the advice of my pious and dearest mother.” In 976 and 985 she presided over the hearings of the Royal Court in Italy. After her son’s death in 983 she became joint regent with daughter-in-law Theophano, a Byzantine princess until her death eight years later followed by assuming the regency on behalf of her grandson Otto III until 995 when he came of age at fourteen. She was adviser to her daughter Emma, queen of West Francia influencing French politics and involved in correspondence about benefices, excommunications, political plots and shifting alliances and requests for preference and promotion.

She was loved by her people, gave money to the religious foundations, personally distributed food and clothing to the poor and made several pilgrimages to religious sites in France, Germany, and Italy. After her grandson Otto III’s coronation she lived in a nunnery using the title "Adelheida, by God's gift Empress, by herself a poor sinner and God's maidservant”. She devoted herself to the service of the church, peace and to the empire as the guardian of both. Adelaide was also interested in the conversion of the Slavs, a principal agent of the work of the pre-schism Orthodox Catholic Church and construction of the religious culture of Central Europe, canonized by the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Church.

Adelaide was one of the most important political figures of her time, a mater renorum (mother of several kingdoms)