Ageltrude

Ageltrude was empress of the West and queen of Italy, the wife of Guy of Spoleto and mother of Lambert of Spoleto. She died on 27 August 923. She is not a saint with a feast in the calendar: history keeps her as a woman of great power in the Italy of the 890s, a time marked by struggles for the crown and for the see of Rome.

Family and marriage

Ageltrude was the daughter of Adelchis, prince of Benevento, and Adeltrude, of a Lombard house. She grew up in a land long held to be the unconquered fortress of Lombard resistance to Frankish rule. There, on 13 August 871, the emperor Louis II and the empress Engelberga had been seized and imprisoned in the castle of Benevento. The sources do not agree on the year of her marriage: she married Guy of Spoleto around 875 or in the early 880s, when he was only duke and margrave of Spoleto and Camerino.

In 889 Guy defeated Berengar and became king of Italy, and in 891 he was crowned emperor, making Ageltrude empress. His reign was short. Guy died in 894, leaving her a widow. As their son, Lambert, was a minor, she took the regency. She urged her son to oppose their implacable enemies, the Carolingians, and sought to sway papal elections in their favour.

The struggle for the crown and for Rome

In 894 Ageltrude accompanied Lambert, then fourteen, to Rome so that Pope Formosus might confirm his title as emperor. The pope, however, supported the Carolingian claimant Arnulf of Carinthia. In 896 Arnulf entered Rome and was crowned in place of Lambert, on 22 February, and Ageltrude and her son took refuge at Spoleto. She sought to win back the Lombard lands of southern Italy and opposed the pope's claims to them.

The loss was only temporary. Formosus died soon after crowning Arnulf, on 4 April 896, and Arnulf himself was struck by an illness that paralysed him. The chronicler Liutprand of Cremona ascribes the illness to Ageltrude's scheming. In a position of such power she asserted her authority over Rome. After the very brief two-⁠week reign of Pope Boniface VI, she worked to have her own candidate elected, Pope Stephen VI. At her and Lambert's request the body of Formosus was dug up and put on trial on a charge of having moved from one see to another. He was condemned, and his body was thrown into the Tiber. The event came to be known as the "Cadaver Synod". Lambert became Lambert II, king of Italy.

Retirement

In 898 her son died. After his death Ageltrude withdrew from politics and settled in the convent of Camerino, and later in that of Salsomaggiore. She died on 27 August 923.