St. Adelaide

Adelaide of Burgundy is the wife of two Holy Roman Emperors and one of the most consequential women in the political history of tenth-century Europe. The political significance of her life must be distinguished from the sanctity of it — a distinction she herself would have recognized as requiring effort to maintain.

She was born around 931, the daughter of Rudolf II of Burgundy, and married Lothair II of Italy at sixteen. When Lothair died in 950, the usurper Berengar II seized power, imprisoned Adelaide, and attempted to force her to marry his son. She escaped — the account of the escape, with the help of a monk who dug a passage through her prison wall, is one of the more dramatic episodes in her story — and appealed to Otto I of Saxony, who came south, defeated Berengar, and married Adelaide himself in 951. Through the rest of Otto's reign and his son Otto II's, Adelaide was Empress of Germany and Italy, a position she occupied at the heart of the political and ecclesiastical life of the empire.

The most instructive phase of her story begins after Otto II's death in 983, when the regency dispute between Adelaide and her daughter-in-law Theophanu effectively displaced her from the court. The years of political marginalization — living partly with her brother in Burgundy, partly at the Cluniac Abbey of Selz which she had founded in Alsace — gave her the leisure and the distance from power that completed the formation that a life of imperial activity had begun. The reconciliation with Theophanu shortly before Theophanu's death in 991, the subsequent regency for her grandson the young Otto III, and the final decade at Selz represent the most genuinely holy phase of a life that had always been directed toward the good: the dowager empress who chose the monastery over the court when the choice became available. She was canonized in 1097.