Ermengarde of Tours

Ermengarde of Tours was a ninth-century Frankish noblewoman who became empress as the wife of the Carolingian emperor Lothair I. She was the daughter of Hugh, Count of Tours, a leading magnate of Etichonid descent who held extensive honors in Alsace and around Tours, and of Hugh’s wife Ava. Contemporary narrative sources do not record a precise year or place of birth; later estimates around the turn of the ninth century remain conjectural. In October 821, at the palace of Thionville (Diedenhofen), she was married to Lothair, eldest son of Emperor Louis the Pious. Court writers such as Thegan noted the match, which bound the imperial family to Hugh’s powerful kindred at a moment when Louis was seeking aristocratic support for the kingships assigned to his sons. Through the marriage Ermengarde became queen of Italy, where Lothair already ruled, and later empress when her husband was associated in the imperial title and, after 840, when he succeeded as emperor in the middle portion of the Frankish realm.

Throughout the 830s Ermengarde stood beside Lothair in the repeated crises that divided Louis the Pious from his adult sons. When Lothair and his brothers rebelled in 830 and again in 833–834, her natal family was implicated in the shifting coalitions of the palace. Hugh of Tours had already suffered disgrace after the failure of a campaign on the Spanish March in the late 820s, and the fortunes of Ermengarde’s relatives rose and fell with Lothair’s. After Louis the Pious died in 840, civil war among the three surviving brothers ended with the Treaty of Verdun in 843, which assigned Lothair the imperial title and a middle kingdom stretching from the North Sea to Italy. Ermengarde thereby became empress of that middle realm. Frankish annals and charters show her intervening in grants, attending assemblies, and exercising the traditional queenly role of intercessor at court.

Ermengarde is unusually well attested among Carolingian consorts as a patron of letters and of monastic life. Rabanus Maurus dedicated to her his commentary on the Book of Judith, addressing her as a woman of learning and Christian virtue and implicitly comparing her to the biblical heroine. Other scholars of the East Frankish and Italian courts sought her protection. In Italy she was connected with the royal nunnery of San Salvatore (Santa Giulia) at Brescia, an important Carolingian female house that later passed to her daughter Gisela. In 849 she founded a Benedictine abbey for women at Erstein in Alsace, endowed it with lands and relics, and obtained imperial confirmation of its privileges. The house was intended as a family memorial and as a place of prayer for the dynasty; it also anchored Carolingian authority in Alsace, a region long associated with her Etichonid ancestors.

Ermengarde and Lothair I had several children who became central figures in the later ninth-century partition of the empire. Their sons included Louis II, who was crowned emperor and ruled in Italy; Lothair II, who received the northern portion of the middle kingdom (Lotharingia); and Charles, who became king of Provence. Daughters included Gisela, abbess of San Salvatore at Brescia, and Bertha, associated with the convent of Avenay, together with others named in later genealogical tradition. Ermengarde died on 20 March 851 and was buried at Erstein, the abbey she had founded only two years earlier. Lothair I did not remarry and died in 855. Although medieval writers praised Ermengarde’s piety and her care for churches, she was not the object of a formal canonization or of an established liturgical cult, and no feast day or patronage is securely attached to her name.