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Biography

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Hildegard of Vinzgouw, also known as Hildegard of the Vinzgau, was queen of the Franks in the later eighth century as the wife of Charlemagne. She came from the Alemannian, or Swabian, aristocracy. Her father was Count Gerold of Vinzgau, sometimes identified with Gerold of Kraichgau, and her mother was Imma, also called Emma. The Vinzgau was a county in Alemannia, in the upper Rhine country of what is now southwestern Germany. Einhard later described Hildegard as belonging to the most noble stock of the Swabians. Through her mother she is often thought to have been connected with the former ducal house of Alemannia, a kinship that would have helped Charlemagne attach the Alemannian nobility more firmly to the Frankish crown after the old duchy had been brought under direct royal rule.

In 771, after Charlemagne repudiated Desiderata, the daughter of the Lombard king Desiderius, he married Hildegard. The marriage lasted until her death about twelve years later. In that time she bore nine children. Those who reached adulthood included Charles the Younger, associated in the kingship of the Franks during his father's lifetime; Carloman, renamed Pepin and made king of Italy; and Louis, later known as Louis the Pious, who succeeded Charlemagne as emperor. Daughters who survived childhood included Rotrude, Bertha, and Gisela. Other children died young, among them Adelaide, born during a royal journey in Italy; Lothair, the twin brother of Louis; and a daughter named Hildegard, born near the end of the queen's life. Hildegard traveled with the court and accompanied Charlemagne on campaign, including into Italy, which indicates that she functioned as a full queen consort and not merely as a domestic figure at home.

Near-contemporary Frankish writers remembered her as a woman of distinguished birth. Einhard named her among Charlemagne's wives and recorded the children of the marriage. Thegan of Trier called her most noble. With Charlemagne she took part in the religious patronage expected of Carolingian royalty. Later tradition, especially at the Abbey of Kempten in the Swabian or Bavarian lands, regarded her as a foundress or co-foundress of that house, and a local cult grew up around her memory there. She was also associated with the abbey of Saint-Arnould at Metz, a church closely tied to the Carolingian family and to the cult of Saint Arnulf of Metz, an ancestor of the dynasty.

Hildegard died on 30 April 783 at Thionville, known in German as Diedenhofen, in the Moselle country, not long after the birth of her last child. She was buried at the Abbey of Saint-Arnould in Metz. Charlemagne afterward married Fastrada. Hildegard's surviving sons remained central to the Carolingian succession in Francia, Italy, and Aquitaine. In later medieval centuries she was venerated in some German monastic circles as a saint or blessed woman, and her feast was kept on 30 April, the day of her death. There is no evidence of a formal papal canonization of the kind that became standard in later ages; her cult remained local and traditional rather than universally established.

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