On Christmas Day of the year 983 Otto III was crowned king of the East Franks at Aachen.1 He was three years old. The child’s father, Emperor Otto II, while occupied with affairs in Italy had arranged for his son’s election and coronation as co-ruler, just as his father Otto I had secured the Ottonian dynasty’s claim to the throne by making the same arrangements for Otto II several decades before. To judge from Otto II’s experiences as junior king, it was not necessary for the king-in-waiting to do much of anything during his father’s lifetime; indeed, to judge by a report in the monastic chronicle Casus sancti Galli, as he grew to adulthood Otto II had chafed at his honored but powerless position.2 At most, a junior king, especially one as young as Otto III in 983, served as a sort of figurehead, an Ottonian presence in Germany. Such a royal presence may have been regarded as necessary since Otto II was making an extended stay in Italy, attempting to recover from his devastating defeat at the hands of the Saracens in southern Italy in the Battle of Cotrone the previous year. Such a figurehead status was nothing new; as early as Charlemagne, the Carolingians had installed underage subkings to serve the same function.3 Certainly nobody expected a three-year-old to hold the reins of government.
But, unbeknownst to anyone in Aachen on that Christmas Day, they were anointing not a junior shadow king who could serve as his father’s figurehead in Germany but rather the sole ruler of the extensive German reich, which in this period included northern Italy as well as much of the territory that constitutes modern Germany. Otto II, king of Germany and emperor of that greater German state, had died on December 7 in Rome, aged only twenty-eight.
The existence of a consecrated king who was a minor led to a crisis that threatened to tear the German empire to pieces. Otto III was manifestly unable to rule—he could not lead troops, sit in judgment, give largesse, or indeed undertake any of the tasks expected of a tenth-century ruler. Yet, since Archbishops Willigis of Mainz and John of Ravenna had anointed the child as king in a ceremony of profound religious significance, and he had received the fealty of Germany’s nobles, Otto could not be set aside. Obviously there would have to be an extended regency, with more than a decade to wait before Otto III could rule for himself.4 The situation was exacerbated by Otto II’s recent defeat in southern Italy and the Slavic rebellion of 982, suggesting the need for a strong, adult ruler who could lead armies. Nonetheless, after a period of confusion in which Otto III’s cousin Henry “the Quarrelsome” of Bavaria attempted to seize power for himself, the dust cleared to reveal Otto III’s mother Theophanu firmly in charge as protector of the young king and helmswoman of the reich. When Theophanu died in 991, Otto III’s grandmother, the empress Adelheid, assumed the same role, caring for Otto III and the state until her grandson attained his majority at age fourteen.
Historians have tended to treat the period of Otto III’s minority lightly, then and now glossing over the distinct contribution of the regents. Part of the problem is that it can be difficult to discern how any ruler, male or female, actually ruled most of the time in this period.5 But the difficulties of reconstructing the activities of rulers are exacerbated in a period of regency by the nature of our sources. By the conventions of the late tenth and eleventh centuries, Otto III ruled from the moment of his coronation, presented in documents both official and unofficial as a legal adult even though biologically he was still a child. As a result, charters were issued in Otto’s name, it was Otto who engaged in warfare, and so on. The very idea of a “minority” was an expression of private law, implying incapacity, and was a contradiction in terms for a ruler—there was no legal concept of a minor king.6 In other words, we know that adults must have acted for him in these affairs, but it is difficult to tease out the role of de facto regents in a society that did not even have a term for a regent or regency.7
In the tenth century both western and central Europe saw a high point in rulers’ dependence on female members of their families as notions of proper rulership expanded but bureaucratic structures remained modest. But this trend was emphasized to a particularly high degree in the German reich—the territories, whether German-, Slavic-, or Italian-speaking under Ottonian lordship. The tenth century was a pivotal era in European history, as institutions of government evolved that, for example, made it less necessary for a king to lead his troops in person. Certainly the Ottonians had some officials at their command and a chancery that almost certainly produced much written work besides the significant number of extant charters we have; still, the teams of clerks who created the English Domesday Book in the late eleventh century could scarcely be imagined yet.8 In Germany, where a tradition of strong regional duchies always provided a pronounced centrifugal pull against rulers, kings clearly needed lieutenants who could be trusted through thick and thin. As is well known, the rulers of the Ottonian dynasty (919–1024) increasingly looked to bishops to provide a counterweight to the ambitions of the secular nobility, finally relying so heavily on the clergy that some historians dubbed the phenomenon a full-scale “imperial church system” (Reichskirchensystem) and regarded the rulers’ empowerment of bishops (and to a lesser degree abbots) as a conscious tool of government.9
Less considered by historians is what a German historian might call a Weibersystem—a reliance on wives and other family members to help support the king/emperor in the work of rule. Yet, I argue in this book that in the tenth century the German rulers relied most heavily not on bishops but on their royal kinswomen, the “imperial ladies” whose loyalty was certain because their own lives were so fully intertwined with the success or failure of the dynasty. As Germany moved toward a system of primogeniture, kings often could not even trust their brothers—but they could trust their wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. And, as I hope to show, the male rulers of the Ottonian dynasty carefully built up the status and resources of the dominae imperiales to the point that these women could, at need, wield extensive power and even wider-reaching authority in society at large.
The power of royal women was always contingent. First and foremost, a queen was expected to perform her biological duty and produce heirs for her husband. During exactly the period about which I am writing, in the 990s, King Robert of France repudiated his first wife, who had failed to bear a son. In 1003 he cast aside his second wife—in both cases citing the lack of a child to justify his action.10 The German royal women at the center of this study were fecund. Queen Mechtild bore three sons and two daughters to Henry I. Otto I’s first wife Edgitha had a son and a daughter before her early death; Adelheid produced three sons and a daughter in rapid succession after his remarriage, although two of the sons soon died. Theophanu in her turn gave birth to five children in a five-year period, four of whom lived to adulthood (a daughter who was apparently the twin of Otto III died soon after birth).11 The last Ottonian empress, Kunigunde, never produced a child, yet no effort was ever made to set her aside, suggesting that her political importance was so great that it trumped her reproductive role. For the others, however, pregnancy and childbirth played an important part in defining their role. One can also assume that they continued to play a role in the raising of their children, as we know Empress Gisela did with the education of the future Henry III, although contemporary writers paid little attention to this role.12
Some historians regard the period up to the late tenth century as a golden age for women, an epoch of potential equality, but I agree with their critics who argue that the “golden age” idea goes too far.13 I do not wish to suggest that tenth-century German queens and empresses were their husbands’ equals or that their relationships reached the “partnership marriage” ideal of modern times. This was a society in which men ruled, and women were expected to play a subsidiary role. But, as we will examine, contemporaries normally understood the gender difference enunciated in the extant primary sources as a difference of function rather than of capacity. In other words, people in the tenth century, at least those who wrote and whose works have survived to the present day, thought that women had the necessary intelligence and determination to take a leadership role if it were thrust upon them. Imperial women, consortes imperii as both narrative and diplomatic sources name them, were “sharers” in imperial rule. They were not equal partners, to be sure, but as junior partners they had a vital role to play. Perhaps sometimes they pushed too hard, leading their husbands to assert themselves in reminders as in a document detailing one of Henry II’s gifts in the year 1017 that states bluntly that men are made to rule and women to be ruled. The historian Ingrid Baumgärtner interprets this extraordinary passage as a sign that Henry was not very willing to make the gift for which Empress Kunigunde intervened and perhaps resented his wife’s advocacy for the recipient—although he made the requested grant.14 In contrast, Wipo, the biographer of Emperor Conrad II, went so far as to call his hero’s consort, Empress Gisela, his “necessary companion.”15 Certainly Gisela, like the empresses at the heart of this study, had the resources necessary for her to play a vital role in the government of the reich.
It was possible for Ottonian imperial women to play a role that was scarcely imaginable in earlier centuries. I do not mean to suggest that Germanic women in earlier centuries did not frequently attain and wield considerable power; examples of Merovingian queens like Brunnhild are numerous enough to show that women could be powerful. The root of their power did not change over time—it lay in the ability to exercise influence on their menfolk, most frequently their sons.16 But, I would argue, Merovingian ruling women’s power remained more contingent than that of their Ottonian counterparts, because they did not receive the means to exert independent influence, in strong contrast to the Ottonian royal women. While it remained true that no woman could really act as “ruler” apart from her husband or son,17 women wielding power did in fact exist and were able to exist without doing violence to notions of rule in Ottonian society. Therefore, the Ottonians charted a different path from their Carolingian predecessors, for whom, as Janet Nelson has noted, femineum imperium was a contradiction in terms.18 By the early decades of the eleventh century, the queen-empresses of Germany had more influence than they ever exercised either before or after that time.19
While this study focuses on Ottonian Germany, it is important to note that this openn...