Hildegard of Metz

[Leo Akershoek]

Hello,

Can someone help me with the (detailed) ancestry of:

Hildegard of Metz,

who married in the year 1000 to Foulques III d' Anjou.
They both died in the year 1040.

Thanks in advance for your help.
Regards

Leo
aker...@zeelandnet.nl
My hobby?
Digging up dead relatives!

[John Carmi Parsons]

The most recent statement on Hildegarde's ancestry is to be found in
Christian Settipani's article on the counts of Anjou and their marriages
which appears in the volume edited by Keats-Rohan, _Family Trees and the
Roots of Politics: The prosopography of Britain and France from the Tenth
Century to the Twelfth Century_ (Boydell, 1997).

On pp. 253-54, Settipani discusses the lack of secure evidence for
Hildegarde's family. The only reliable statement comes from a charter for
the abbey of La Ronceray, which states that she came from Lotharingia and
was of royal descent. An 1887 work by Loizeau de Grandmaison took this to
mean that she belonged to the family of the counts of Nordgau, though
there is no documentary proof of this. Bernard Bachrach however thought
that she might be identified with the Hildegarde who is known as a sister
of Pope Leo IX, himself a member of the Nordgau family. Unfortunately we
also know that that Hildegarde married a count of Montbeliard, which puts
her out of the running as a possible countess of Anjou. As Settipani notes,
moreover, a sister of Leo IX, who was born in 1002, would have been extremely
young at her (supposed) marriage to Fulk of Anjou around 1000.

Settipani accepts, however, the likelihood that Hildegarde was in some way
related to the counts of Nordgau, the only family of that region that was
of sufficient eminence, and royal ancestry, to marry into the rising and
powerful house of Anjou. The name Hildegarde was common among the Nordgau
house, moreover, and they certainly had royal blood. Assuming Hildegarde was
born around 985, he theorizes she might have been a first cousin of Leo IX,
possibly a daughter of Leo's uncle Eberhard though there is no proof of that
filiation and Settipani scrupulously leaves it as a "working hypothesis."

John Parsons

[Todd A. Farmerie]

Leo Akershoek wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> Can someone help me with the (detailed) ancestry of:
>
> Hildegard of Metz,
>
> who married in the year 1000 to Foulques III d' Anjou.
> They both died in the year 1040.

The surviving information does not allow her parentage to be
determined. All that is known is the general region from which she
came.

taf