cahn

You're viewing

cahn's journal
Create a Dreamwidth Account Learn More

Reload page in style: site light

In the previous post Charles II found AITA:

Look, I, m, believe in live and let live. (And in not going on my travels again. Had enough of that to last a life time.) Why can't everyone else around me be more chill? Instead, my wife refuses to employ my girlfriend, my girlfriend won't budge and accept another office, my brother is set on a course to piss off everyone (he WILL go on his travels again), and my oldest kid shows signs of wanting my job which is just not on, sorry to say. And don't get me started about Mom (thank God she's living abroad). What am I doing wrong? AITA?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Ha, neat find!

My own trivia share is this: remember when we recently learned that the only three women buried in St. Peter's Basilica are Christina of Sweden, Matilda of Tuscany, and Clementina Sobieska, mother of Bonnie Prince Charlie?

Well, here I am reading along in my book on the investiture controversy (

cahn, this is circa 1100), and according to the author, Heinrich IV's mother, the Empress Agnes, who tried to help reconcile Heinrich and Pope Gregory VII, was buried in St. Peter's.

Wikipedia, both English and German, agrees. German wiki even gives a source: Kaiserin Agnes (1043–1077). Quellenkritische Studien (Empress Agnes (1043-1077). Source Critical Studies.)

So I google this topic, and I find a few sources, like this one, claiming that there actually 6 documented women buried in St. Peter's: the three we know of, St. Petronella, Charlotte of Cyprus, and Agnesina Colonna Caetani.

None of whom is the Empress Agnes! So what gives? My first guess is that Agnes, being 11th century, was of course buried in the old St. Peter's, which was torn down to make the new one in the Renaissance, and many of the bodies didn't survive, or were moved elsewhere. (English wiki says she "is" buried there, but that's too much weight to put on a verb tense in a wiki article.) So maybe "only three women" or "only six women" means "only X women whose burials you can visit today in the new St. Peter's Basilica." But! German wiki also says that Urban VIII had Matilda of Tuscany brought to Rome in 1630, where she was the first woman buried in St. Peter's.

Now, again, maybe that's the first woman buried in the new St. Peter's. But symbolically, surely the honor of being buried in the same place was just as great before the building was torn down and rebuilt? It feels odd to disregard everything before that: how many other women were buried in the old St. Peter's who are being ignored?

selenak, can you think of something I'm missing here?

P.S. I do want to respond to your Pompadour comment, but...we'll see how German practice goes today.

[ETA: This was meant to be a reply to the Alte Pinakothek discovery, but since I switched topics anyway, I'll leave it as a top-level comment.]

Edited Date: 2022-04-03 05:03 pm (UTC)

From:

selenak

No, I don't know anything more than you do. I see German wiki says nothing about her current state, it says "she was buried in the Petronella rotund of St. Peter's", which could indeed mean the body's remains didn't survive into the new St. Peter's.

BTw, reminder to

cahn: Petronella was the most likely fictional daughter of St. Peter the apostle himself. Since Petronella's existence is entirely due to apocryphal legends, no one knows whose bones those were.

Howeve,r thinking about this further, I have a theory. It's a counter reformation PR coup on Pope Urban's part when he moves Matilda's earthly remains to Rome to claim she is the first. Consider: by this time, Agnes is obscure, not many people still remember who she was, and also: her husband deposed three popes and replaced them with his candidates. Her son duked famously duked it out with Pope Gregory throughout his life, and while he died excommunicated, Gegory died far from Rome and on the run. Her grandson also had a Pope on the run and forced a Roman coronation. Now, Agnes herself may have tried to reconcile her son with the Pope, and took holy orders in her later years, but she did not side with the Pope as clear cut as Matilda, who was utterly consistent in this, far more successful against the Emperor than most, and who hosted the high point (from a clerical pov) of the Heinrich IV/Gregory feuding, Heinrich having to humiliate himself at Canossa. (What most people forget is that he had Gregory on the run after that episode, which didn't settle anything.

And now we're in the 17th century where there's a brutal decades long religious war raging across the continent, which, however, has already bred stange allegiances (Cardinal Richelieu/Protestant Sweden), and if you, as Pope, want to remind people in power of anything, it's that SIDING WITH THE CHURCH IS RIGHT AND WOE IF YOU DON'T, whereas if you do side with the Church you get to lie near Peter himself and be honored through the centuries, which you do when honoring Matilda. "Second woman to be buried at St. Peter's", let alone "number X", just doesn't have the same ring as "first".

At least that's my theory!

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Makes sense!

From:

cahn

SIDING WITH THE CHURCH IS RIGHT AND WOE IF YOU DON'T, whereas if you do side with the Church you get to lie near Peter himself and be honored through the centuries

Hee. Now I kind of want the Heaven!AU where Matilda and Agnes get in a catfight, with bonus points if they end up teaming up on Pope Urban :D

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Hee! Well, no fic from me in the cards, but next on my reading list after Catherine de Medici is a bio of Matilda I found on Kindle (Amazon finally being willing to freaking sell me a book in German), so maybe one of our salon AUs that Selena is so good at will happen. :)