Jump to content

Agatha (wife of Edward the Exile): Difference between revisions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Browse history interactively
← Previous editNext edit →
Content deleted Content added
VisualWikitext
Death refs
Line 20: Line 20:


== Kievan theory ==
== Kievan theory ==

===Daughter of Yaroslav the Wise===


Jetté pointed out that [[William of Malmesbury]] in ''De Gestis Regis Anglorum'' and several later chronicles unambigously state that Agatha's sister was a Queen of Hungary. From what we know about the biography of [[Edward the Exile]], he loyally supported [[Andrew I of Hungary]], following him from [[Kiev]] to Hungary in [[1046]] and staying at his court for many years. Andrew's wife and queen was Anastasia, a daughter of [[Yaroslav the Wise]] of [[Kiev]] by [[Ingegerd Olofsdotter|Ingigerd of Sweden]]. Following Jetté's logic, Edward's wife was another daughter of Yaroslav. [[Image:Yardaughters.jpg|thumb|275px|11th-century fresco representing the daughters of Yaroslav I.]]
Jetté pointed out that [[William of Malmesbury]] in ''De Gestis Regis Anglorum'' and several later chronicles unambigously state that Agatha's sister was a Queen of Hungary. From what we know about the biography of [[Edward the Exile]], he loyally supported [[Andrew I of Hungary]], following him from [[Kiev]] to Hungary in [[1046]] and staying at his court for many years. Andrew's wife and queen was Anastasia, a daughter of [[Yaroslav the Wise]] of [[Kiev]] by [[Ingegerd Olofsdotter|Ingigerd of Sweden]]. Following Jetté's logic, Edward's wife was another daughter of Yaroslav. [[Image:Yardaughters.jpg|thumb|275px|11th-century fresco representing the daughters of Yaroslav I.]]
Line 32: Line 34:


One inference from the Kievan theory is that Edgar Atheling and St. Margaret were, through their mother, first cousins of [[Philip I of France]]. The connection is too notable to be omitted from contemporary sources, yet we have no indication that medieval chroniclers were aware of it. The argumentum ex silentio lead critics of the Kievan theory to search for alternative explanations.
One inference from the Kievan theory is that Edgar Atheling and St. Margaret were, through their mother, first cousins of [[Philip I of France]]. The connection is too notable to be omitted from contemporary sources, yet we have no indication that medieval chroniclers were aware of it. The argumentum ex silentio lead critics of the Kievan theory to search for alternative explanations.

===Sister of Yaroslav the Wise=== (resume extracted from [http://genealogy.euweb.cz/note/agatha.html#E])

According to some sources, the last wife of the Prince Saint Vladimir the Great was a daughter of [[Conrad I of Swabia|Conrad I, Duke of Swabia]] and Rechilinda Otona (Regelindis), who in turn was the illegitimate daughter of the Emperor [[Otto I the Great]]. The marriage between Vladimir and the Swabian princess would took place aroun [[1012]] and some later, they had a daughter, Dobronegra, later Queen of Poland.

Some medieval chroniclers called Agatha a relative of the Emperor Henry (II or III) of Germany. The mother of Dobronegra was apparently (according the sources) a first cousin of the Emperor [[Henry III of Germany|Henry III]]. If Agatha was the full younger sister of Dobronegra?...

The chroniclers also called Agatha a "sister" of the Hungarian Queen. This in fact, could happend: if she was the youngest of all the children of Vladimir, was only a child when his father died, in [[1019]]. She and Dobronegra could be raised by his old half-brother Yaroslav with his own daughters.<ref>It is generally accepted that Dobronega married [[Casimir I of Poland]] about the same year when Edward is thought to have married Agatha (judging by the date when their eldest child was born). As Yaroslav's sister (rather than daughter as Jette thought), Agatha would still have close ties to the Hungarian royal family (the chroniclers maybe identified her as a sister of the Queen of Hungary because they grown together). For instance, one of Yaroslav's sisters was the wife of Ladislas the Bald, a paternal uncle of Andrew I.</ref>


== Bulgarian theory ==
== Bulgarian theory ==

Revision as of 20:02, 10 June 2007

Agatha was the wife of Edward the Exile (heir to the throne of England) and mother of Edgar Ætheling, Saint Margaret of Scotland and Cristina of England. Her antecedents are unclear, and subject to much speculation.

Life

Nothing is known of her early life, and what speculation has appeared is inextricably linked to the contentious issue of Agatha's paternity, one of the unresolved questions of medieval genealogy. She came to England with her husband and children in 1057, but she was widowed within weeks of arriving. In 1067, following the Norman conquest of England, she fled with her children to Scotland, finding refuge under Malcolm III, who would become her son-in-law. One source gives her last years as a nun at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, dying before circa 1093 [1]. However Symeon of Durham [1] carries what appears to be the last reference to her in 1070.[2]

Medieval sources

Agatha's origin is alluded to in numerous surviving medieval sources, but the information they provide is sometimes imprecise, often contradictory, and occasionally outright impossible. The earliest surviving source, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, along with Florence of Worcester's Chronicon ex chronicis and Regalis prosapia Anglorum, Simeon of Durham and Ailred of Rievaulx describe Agatha as a kinswoman of "Emperor Henry" (thaes ceseres maga, filia germani imperatoris Henrici). In an earlier entry, the same Ailred of Rievaulx had called her daughter of emperor Henry, as do later sources of dubious credibility such as the Chronicle of Melrose Abbey, while Matthew of Paris calls her the emperor's sister (soror Henrici imperatoris Romani). Geoffrey Gaimar in Lestoire des Engles states that she was daughter of the Hungarian king and queen (Li reis sa fille), although he places the marriage at a time when Edward is thought still to have been in Kiev, while Orderic Vitalis in Historiae Ecclesiasticae is more specific, naming her father as king Solomon (filiam Salomonis Regis Hunorum), actually a contemporary of Agatha's children. William of Malmesbury in De Gestis Regis Anglorum states that Agatha's sister was a Queen of Hungary (reginae sororem) and is echoed in this by Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, while less precisely, Ailred says of Margaret that she was derived from English and Hungarian royal blood (de semine regio Anglorum et Hungariorum extitit oriunda). Finally, Roger of Howden and the anonymous Leges Edwardi Confessoris indicate that while Edward was a guest of Kievan "king Malesclodus" he married a woman of noble birth (nobili progenio), Leges adding that the mother of St. Margaret was of Russian royal blood (ex genere et sanguine regum Rugorum).[3]

German theories

While various sources repeat the claims that Agatha was daughter or sister of either Emperor Henry, it seems unlikely that such a sibling or daughter would have been ignored by the German chroniclers.

The description of Agatha as a blood relative of "Emperor Henry" may be applicable to a niece of either Henry II or Henry III, Holy Roman Emperors (although Florence, in Regalis prosapia Anglorum specifies Henry III). Early attempts at reconstructing the relationship focussed on the former. Georgio Pray (1764, Annales Regum Hungariae), O.F. Suhm (1777, Geschichte Dänmarks, Norwegen und Holsteins) and Istvan Katona (1779, Historia Critica Regum Hungariae) each suggested that Agatha was daughter of Henry II's brother Bruno of Augsburg (an ecclesiastic described as beatae memoriae, with no known issue), while Daniel Cornides (1778, Regum Hungariae) tried to harmonize the German and Hungarian claims, making Agatha daughter of Henry II's sister Giselle of Bavaria, wife of Stephen I of Hungary.[4] This solution remained popular among scholars through a good part of 20th century.

Although it's tempting to view St. Margaret as a granddaughter of another famous saint, Stephen of Hungary, this popular solution fails to explain why Stephen's death triggered a dynastic crisis in Hungary. If St. Stephen and Giselle were indeed Agatha's parents, her offspring should have succeeded to the Hungarian crown and the dynastic strife could have been averted. Actually, there is no indication in Hungarian sources that any of Stephen's children outlived him. Likewise, all of the solutions involving Henry II would seem to make Agatha much older than her husband, and prohibitively old at the time of the birth of her son, Edgar.

Based on a more strict translation of the Latin description used by Florence and others as well as the supposition that Henry III was the Emperor designated in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, genealogist Szabolcs de Vajay popularized another idea first suggested in 1939.[5]. He hypothesized that Agatha was the daughter of Henry III's elder (uterine) half-brother, Liudolf, Margrave of West Friesland. This did require a reevaluation of the chronology of the marriages and children of Gisela of Swabia, mother of both Henry III and Liudolf. The theory saw broad acceptance for thirty years [6] until René Jetté proposed a Kievan solution to the problem,[7] since which time opinion has been divided among several competing possibilities.[8]

Kievan theory

Daughter of Yaroslav the Wise

Jetté pointed out that William of Malmesbury in De Gestis Regis Anglorum and several later chronicles unambigously state that Agatha's sister was a Queen of Hungary. From what we know about the biography of Edward the Exile, he loyally supported Andrew I of Hungary, following him from Kiev to Hungary in 1046 and staying at his court for many years. Andrew's wife and queen was Anastasia, a daughter of Yaroslav the Wise of Kiev by Ingigerd of Sweden. Following Jetté's logic, Edward's wife was another daughter of Yaroslav.

File:Yardaughters.jpg
11th-century fresco representing the daughters of Yaroslav I.

This theory accords with the seemingly incongruous statements of Geoffrey Gaimar and Roger of Howden that, while living in Kiev, Edward took a nativeborn wife "of noble parentage" or that his father-in-law was a "Russian king".[9]

Jetté's theory seems to be supported by an onomastic argument.[10] Among the medieval royalty, Agatha's rare Greek name is first recorded in the Macedonian dynasty of Byzantium; it was also one of the most frequent feminine names in the Kievan Rurikid dynasty.[11] After Anna of Byzantium married Yaroslav's father, he took the Christian name of the reigning emperor, Basil II, while some members of his family were named after other members of the imperial dynasty. Agatha could have been one of these.[12]

The names of Agatha's immediate descendants — Margaret, Cristina, David, Alexander — were likewise extraordinary for Anglo-Saxon Britain. They may provide a clue to Agatha's origin. The names Margaret and Cristina are today associated with Sweden, the native country of Yaroslav's wife Ingigerd.[13] The name of Margaret's son, David, obviously echoes that of Solomon, the son and heir of Andrew I.[14] Furthermore, the first Russian saint (canonized ca. 1073) was Yaroslav's brother Gleb, whose Christian name was David.

The name of Margaret's other son, Alexander, may point to a variety of traditions, both occidental and oriental: the biography of Alexander the Great was one of the most popular books in 11th-century Kiev.

One inference from the Kievan theory is that Edgar Atheling and St. Margaret were, through their mother, first cousins of Philip I of France. The connection is too notable to be omitted from contemporary sources, yet we have no indication that medieval chroniclers were aware of it. The argumentum ex silentio lead critics of the Kievan theory to search for alternative explanations.

===Sister of Yaroslav the Wise=== (resume extracted from [2])

According to some sources, the last wife of the Prince Saint Vladimir the Great was a daughter of Conrad I, Duke of Swabia and Rechilinda Otona (Regelindis), who in turn was the illegitimate daughter of the Emperor Otto I the Great. The marriage between Vladimir and the Swabian princess would took place aroun 1012 and some later, they had a daughter, Dobronegra, later Queen of Poland.

Some medieval chroniclers called Agatha a relative of the Emperor Henry (II or III) of Germany. The mother of Dobronegra was apparently (according the sources) a first cousin of the Emperor Henry III. If Agatha was the full younger sister of Dobronegra?...

The chroniclers also called Agatha a "sister" of the Hungarian Queen. This in fact, could happend: if she was the youngest of all the children of Vladimir, was only a child when his father died, in 1019. She and Dobronegra could be raised by his old half-brother Yaroslav with his own daughters.[15]

Bulgarian theory

One of the latest theories was proposed by Ian Mladjov.[16] Dismissing the Kievan theory as insufficiently grounded, he infers that Agatha was daughter of Gavril Radomir, Tsar of Bulgaria by his first wife, a Hungarian princess, the daughter of Duke Géza of Hungary. This hypothesis has Agatha born in Hungary after her parents divorced, her mother being pregnant when she left Bulgaria, as indicated in Byzantine sources. The argument is based primarily on the onomastic precedent provided by the fact that Gavril Radomir's own mother was also named Agatha,[17] and it vindicates the intimate connection between Agatha and Hungary attested in the Medieval sources.

The article reviews the sources, the Hungarian, German, and Kievan theories for Agatha's antecedents, and looks into the contemporary onomastic repertoire, concluding that of the few contemporary Agathas, only Gavril Radomir's mother could possibly have been an ancestor of the wife of Edward the Exile. Some of the other names associated with Agatha and used to corroborate theories based in onomastics are also readily available within the Bulgarian ruling family at the time, including Mary and several Davids. Another aspect of the study is to draw attention to genealogical improbabilities posed by several marriages within the prohibited degrees of kinship, as posited by earlier theories (especially the German and Kievan ones, including the French marriage of Anne of Kiev). The article also re-examines some long-standing assumptions about the chronology of Gavril Radomir's marriage to the Hungarian princess, and concludes that its dating to the late 980s is unsupportable, and its dissolution belongs in c. 1009–1014.

This corrected chronology, the clear onomastic precedent, and the lack of problematic genealogical relationships would allow Agatha's identification as the daughter of Saint Stephen's sister, raised at the Hungarian court, and married (possibly while in exile in Kievan Rus') to Edward the Exile. It is inferred that the relative familiarity with Germany and unfamiliarity with Hungary partly distorted the depiction of Agatha in the English sources; her actual position would have been that of a daughter of the (unnamed) sister of the King of Hungary (Stephen I), himself the brother-in-law of the Holy Roman Emperor (Henry II, and therefore kinsman of Henry III).

Notes and references

  1. ^ Historia Regum, vol.II, pp.190-192
  2. ^ Foundations (Journal of the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy), vol.1, no.4, July 2004, pps.302-303, ISSN 1479-5078
  3. ^ René Jetté. "Is the Mystery of the Origins of Agatha, Wife of Edward the Exile, Finally Solved?", in New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 150 (October 1996), pp. 417-432; Gabriel Ronay, The lost King of England : the East European adventures of Edward the Exile, Woodbridge, Suffolk ; Wolfeboro, N.H., USA : Boydell Press, 1989, ISBN 0-85115-541-3, pp. 109-121.
  4. ^ Ronay, The lost King of England, pp. 109-121.
  5. ^ Jozsef Herzog, "Skóciai Szent Margit származásának kérdése" [The problem of St Margaret of Scotland's Scottish origins], in Turul vol. 53 (1939), pp. 1-42; Szabolcs de Vajay. "Agatha, Mother St. Margaret, Queen of Scotland", in Duquesne Review, vol. 7, no. 2 (Spring 1962), pp. 71-80.
  6. ^ e.g. Ronay, The lost King of England; Frederick Lewis Weis, Ancestral Roots fo Sixty Colonists who came to New England between 1623 and 1650, 6th edition, Walter Lee Sheppard, ed., p. 3.
  7. ^ René Jetté, "Is the Mystery of the Origins of Agatha, Wife of Edward the Exile, Finally Solved?", in New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 150 (October 1996): 417-432.
  8. ^ David Faris and Douglas Richardson supported the Liudolf connection, "The Origin of Agatha-The Debate Continues: The Parents of Agatha, Wife of Edward The Exile" in New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 152, (April 1998). Norman Ingham supported Jetté in two articles: "A Slavist's View of Agatha, Wife of Edward the Exile, as a Possible Daughter of Yaroslav the Wise" in New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 152 (1998), pp. 216-23; "Has a Missing Daughter of Iaroslav Mudryi Been Found?" in Russian History, vol. 25 (1998 [pub. 1999]), pp. 231-70. Scottish genealogist and antiquarian, Gregory Lauder-Frost, summarised numerous early sources and the various theories: "Agatha-The Ancestry Dispute", in The Scottish Genealogist, Vol. 49, No.3 (September 2002), pp. 71-72. He discounts de Vajay's theories and leans towards Saint Stephen as her father.
  9. ^ It has been suggested that Agatha is one of four or five Yaroslav's daughters represented next to him in the famous 11th-century fresco in the St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev. It is known that Yaroslav's other daughters married Henri I of France and Harald III of Norway. At the time of their marriages, both Harald and Andrew were — just like Edward — the landless pretenders to foreign thrones, who found shelter and support in distant but powerful Kiev.
  10. ^ Pointedly criticized by John Carmi Parsons in his article "Edward the Aetheling's Wife, Agatha", in The Plantagenet Connection, Summer/Winter 2002, pp. 31-54. Donald C. Jackman, "A Greco-Roman Onomastic Fund", in Onomastique et Parente dans l'Occident medieval, Prosographica et Genealogica, Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 14-56, shows several genealogical groupings of individuals in Germany at this time, including Agatha, with seemingly Eastern names. He indicates several possible sources (e.g. the marriages of Emperor Otto II and of Vladimir I of Kiev, and the supposed marriage of Emperor Louis the Blind, to Byzantine brides) for the introduction of these names into the western European dynasties.
  11. ^ А.Ф. Литвина, Ф.Б. Успенский. Выбор имени у русских князей в X-XVI вв.: Династическая история сквозь призму антропонимики. Moscow: Indrik, 2006. ISBN 5-85759-339-5. Page 463.
  12. ^ According to one theory, Agatha was not a daughter but sister of Yaroslav. Indeed, the last wife of Yaroslav's father, Vladimir I, seems to have been a German princess, who could have been described as "filia germani imperatoris Henrici". It is generally accepted that their daughter Dobronega married Casimir I of Poland about the same year when Edward is thought to have married Agatha (judging by the date when their eldest child was born). If Agatha was Yaroslav's sister (rather than daughter as Jette thought), she would still have close ties to the Hungarian royal family. For instance, one of Yaroslav's sisters was the wife of Ladislas the Bald, a paternal uncle of Andrew I.
  13. ^ It has been argued that Ingigerd's original Christian name was Margaret. Whatever the truth, the names Margaret and Cristina were not explicitly recorded in Sweden before the 12th century. For details, see: Ф.Б. Успенский. Скандинавы - Варяги - Русь: Историко-филологические очерки. Moscow, 2002. Pages 60-61.
  14. ^ Andrew's second son was actually named David. Current scholarship traces these names to the famous oration of Ilarion of Kiev, in which he likened Vladimir (i.e., grandfather of Andrew's wife) to the victorious David and Yaroslav (i.e., Andrew's father-in-law) to the wise Solomon. The comparison became so popular that later historians assigned to Yaroslav the sobriquet "Wise".
  15. ^ It is generally accepted that Dobronega married Casimir I of Poland about the same year when Edward is thought to have married Agatha (judging by the date when their eldest child was born). As Yaroslav's sister (rather than daughter as Jette thought), Agatha would still have close ties to the Hungarian royal family (the chroniclers maybe identified her as a sister of the Queen of Hungary because they grown together). For instance, one of Yaroslav's sisters was the wife of Ladislas the Bald, a paternal uncle of Andrew I.
  16. ^ Mladjov, Ian. "Reconsidering Agatha, Wife of Eadward the Exile", in The Plantagenet Connection, vol. 11, Summer/Winter 2003, pp. 1-85. See also a summary in "The Bulgarian Descent of HM Simeon II", in Sega: April 13, 2002 and here.
  17. ^ Her father was a Dyrrachian notable, Ioannes Khrysilios.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Agatha_(wife_of_Edward_the_Exile)&oldid=137305199"