Richardis

Richardis, also known as Richgard or Richardis of Swabia, was a Carolingian empress of the later ninth century and the wife of Charles the Fat (Emperor Charles III). She belonged to the Ahalolfing kindred, a leading noble family of Alamannia and Alsace; her father was Erchanger, count of the Nordgau in Lower Alsace. The year and place of her birth are not recorded in contemporary sources and can be given only approximately as the mid-ninth century in the East Frankish sphere. In the early 860s she was married to Charles, a son of King Louis the German. The match tied Charles to a powerful family on the southwestern edge of the East Frankish kingdom. The marriage remained childless, a fact that later weighed heavily on the politics of Charles’s reign and on the succession to the Carolingian empire.

When Charles obtained the East Frankish crown and, in 881, the imperial title, Richardis became queen and empress. She was associated with his coronation at Rome by Pope John VIII. As empress she is remembered in later tradition for piety and for patronage of religious houses, above all the women’s monastery she established on ancestral land at Andlau in Alsace, generally placed in the years around 880 and placed under a Benedictine observance. Charles’s government in his last years was dominated by his archchaplain and archchancellor, Bishop Liutward of Vercelli. The emperor’s health and authority declined, and the lack of a legitimate heir made the court unstable.

In 887 Richardis was accused of adultery with Liutward. The charge is reported in near-contemporary narrative, notably the Annals of Fulda. She denied infidelity. According to those accounts she also declared that Charles had never known her carnally, a claim bound up with attempts to dissolve or set aside the marriage amid plans concerning the succession. She offered to clear herself by ordeal. Later hagiography developed this into a fully described ordeal by fire, in which she walked unharmed over red-hot ploughshares or a similar test, taken as proof of innocence. That vivid fire miracle is not securely attested in the ninth-century annals and should be treated as subsequent legend, though it shaped her later cult. Liutward was driven from court. Richardis left the emperor’s side and withdrew from public life. Charles was deposed later in 887 and died in 888.

She retired to Andlau, where her niece is named as abbess, and lived out her remaining years in religious retirement at the house she had founded. She died at Andlau and was buried in the abbey. The precise year is not firmly established in contemporary record; liturgical tradition assigns her death to 18 September in the last decade of the ninth century, and later writers have proposed various years in the 890s. A local cult formed at her tomb. In 1049 Pope Leo IX, himself of Alsatian origin, visited Andlau during travels in the region, elevated her relics, and thereby gave papal recognition to her sanctity. She has been venerated since as a saint of the Catholic Church. Her feast is kept on 18 September. She is patron of Andlau and is invoked against fire, a patronage that later devotion linked to the legendary ordeal by which she was said to have proved her innocence.