Archaeology fell prey to one of its common assumptions inherited from Christian teachings: It assumed that a person being born a century after the event was telling the truth about something that had happened a hundred years back. Some writer at some time called Queen Edith’s grave in Magdeburg cathedral a cenotaph and that fact somehow engraved itself in archaeologists’ brains for at least a century and kept on percolating there.
During works of restoration in Magdeburg’s cathedral which were combined with extensive archaeological digs at the same time, the tomb of Queen Edith had to be moved. Lifting the outer casing dating from 1510, a sarcophagus from the 7th century was discovered which by its inscription should contain the remains of Queen Edith. Lifting the lid of 1.5 tons revealed a leaden box from the 13th century which proclaimed itself by inscription again as containing the remains of the Queen.
Little is known about the life of Queen Edith. This is partly due to the lack of sources, partly due to her name being spelled differently as Eadgyth, Ædgyth, Edith, Edgitha, and Editha (maybe also Ediva). Add to this that she is in turn referred to as ‘of Wessex’, ‘of England’, ‘of Germany’, ‘of Saxony’, and ‘of Wettin’, and you get the picture. The lack of information on the other hand is surprising as she had some profound influence on Germany’s future development.
She was born either 910 or 912 as a daughter to King Edward the Elder in England. King Henry the Fowler of Germany (or at that time more correctly King of the Eastern Franks) asked her half-brother King Æthelstan for the hand of an English Princess for his son Otto. Æthelstan took Henry seriously enough to send two Princesses, his two half-sisters Edith and Edgiva, to Quedlinburg in Saxony. According to Widukind the court chronicler it was a love match between Otto and Edith. Edgiva in turn traveled on to the court of the King of Burgundy and married the king’s brother.
Otto and Edith were married in 929, and Edith received the town Magdeburg as a bride gift from Otto. What may sound great today was a pittance on that day. Magdeburg was a small border town on the very fringe of the kingdom which earned its money through trade with the Slavs. But Edith fell in love with the place, had the town moved a few miles inland to its present location to make it more defensible and made it with Otto a Royal Residence (in fact one of the capitals of the realm). The gift wasn’t to be used immediately either, it was intended as a widow’s pension fund.
The marriage was most important to King Henry. He was the first king of the house of Wettin, the first Saxon on a Frankish throne, and in fact his kingship was nothing more than being accepted as Duke of Saxony to lead his fellow Dukes in the realm. With the marriage of Otto, the family was accepted as an equal by the most important royal line in Europe. As a grand-daughter of Alfred the Great, Edith brought with her Royal panache, as a descendant of Saint Oswald of Northumbria, she had the necessary clout to shape church history. As a bonus, the house was now related not only to the Kings of Burgundy, but also to the Kings of France (or rather Kings of the Western Franks), as King Charles was married to a half-sister of Edith.
Edith is not often mentioned as involving herself in politics. The few sources that mention her involvement mainly show her as a petitioner for others, interestingly enough most often for friends and retainers of Otto’s mother Matilda, less surprisingly for the many monasteries and clergy in the realm. She founded (with Otto) the monastery of St. Maurice in Magdeburg as a first step in obtaining the see for a bishop at Magdeburg. With their move to the eastern border, Otto and Edith laid down the politics for Germany’s expansion to the east.
By marriage, she had become Duchess of Saxony and in 936 she became Queen of Germany. It may be inferred that it was her status that made Otto go through with his plans to elevate Henry’s nominal kingship to the full status of reigning king and ram it down his nobles’ throats if necessary by force of arms. It was Otto who finally managed to blackmail the Pope into granting Magdeburg not only the seat of a bishop but of an archbishop.
And maybe it was a love match. Otto and Edith had a son and a daughter before Edith died in 946 in Magdeburg. Most tellingly, Otto decreed in his testament that he should be buried by the side of his beloved wife, Edith (while at the same time being married to Queen Adelheid of Italy). Edith in turn was remembered by the people of Magdeburg as a generous and loving Queen and prayed to as a Saint. She was buried in the monastery of St. Maurice in Magdeburg which stood where the cathedral now stands. That makes archaeologists’ surprise at finding the grave of hers in exactly the place where contemporaries of hers had pointed to even more surprising.
The popular accolade as a Saint was never followed up y the church, probably because the Popes were miffed that she had got her way with getting a bishop for Magdeburg (even though late). Later she became confused with her half-sister, Saint Edith of Tamworth, Queen of Dublin and York. To confound things further, there is also Saint Edith of Wilton, half-sister of King Edward the Martyr and King Ethelred, and her aunt Edith, sister of King Edward the Elder, who resided at the nunnery of Wilton as well.
If you ask as to the importance of Edith for today: She sparked the most royal row between the city of Magdeburg, the (protestant) church authorities of Magdeburg, and Saxony’s State Archaeologists. The spat is one of the most ridiculous posses enacted in Germany in many years and is mainly due to an unimposing mayor out for press presence, an unimportant protestant priest with a penchant for self-promotion, and an unimpressed archaeological society going by the book.
Further reading
Imperial Wedding Document for Princess Theophanu of Byzantium
Count Welf and His Descendants
Emperor Frederick II: A Model Ruler?
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