Mathilda (c. 895 – March 14, 968) was the wife of Henry I the Fowler, King of the East Franks and the first ruler of the Ottonian or Liudolfing dynasty. Their son, Otto, succeeded his father as Otto I the Great.

Our knowledge of Mathilda's life comes largely from brief mentions in the Res Gestae Saxonicae (Deeds of the Saxons) of the monastic historian Widukind of Corvey, and from two sacred biographies (the vita antiquior and vita posterior) written, respectively, in c. 974 and c. 1003. Mathilda was the daughter of the Westfalian count Dietrich and his wife Reinhild, and her biographers traced her ancestry back to the famed eighth and ninth-century Saxon hero, Widukind. As a young girl, she was sent to the convent of Herford, where her reputation for beauty and virtue is said to have attracted the attention of Duke Otto of Saxony, who betrothed her to his son, Henry. They were married in 909 and had three sons and two daughters:

1. Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor
2. Henry I, Duke of Bavaria
3. Bruno I, Archbishop of Cologne
4. Gerberga of Saxony, wife of (1) Duke Giselbert of Lotharingia and (2) King Louis IV of France
5. Hedwig, wife of the West Frankish duke Hugh the Great

After her husband's death in 936, Mathilda remained at the court of her son Otto, until a cabal of royal advisors is reported to have accused her of weakening the royal treasury in order to pay for her charitable activities. After a brief exile at the Westfalian monastery of Enger, Mathilda was brought back to court at the urging of Otto I's first wife, the Anglo-Saxon princess Eadgyth.

Mathilda was celebrated for her devotion to prayer and almsgiving; her first biographer depicted her (in a passage indebted to the sixth-century vita of the Frankish queen Radegund by Venantius Fortunatus) leaving her husband's side in the middle of the night and sneaking off to church to pray. Mathilda founded many religious institutions, including the canonry of Quedlinburg, a center of Ottonian ecclesiastical and secular life and the burial place of Mathilda and her husband, and the convent of Nordhausen, likely the source of at least one of her vitae. She was later canonized.

Sources

• Bernd Schütte, ed., Die Lebensbeschreibungen der Königin Mathilda (MGH SSRG 66) (Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1994)

• Sean Gilsdorf, Queenship and Sanctity: The Lives of Mathilda and the Epitaph of Adelheid (Catholic University of America Press, 2004)

• Winfrid Glocker, Die Verwandten der Ottonen und ihre Bedeutung in der Politik (Böhlau Verlag, 1989), 7-18.

• Karl Schmid, "Die Nachfahren Widukinds," Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 20 (1964): 1-47.

895 births | 968 deaths | German queen consorts | German saints | Ottonian Dynasty | Medieval women

Mathilde die Heilige | Mathildis van Ringelheim