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n the Vigil of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in August of 1193, a young woman was escorted by the bishops of Roskilde and Noyon to the French city of Amiens, where a new life and even a new name awaited her.  She was Ingeborg, sister of the Danish King, Cnut VI, and she was betrothed to a man she’d not yet laid eyes upon, Philippe Capet, King of France.  We know that she was eighteen years old, tall and blonde and said by all of the chroniclers to be beautiful.  We do not know, of course, how she felt about the marriage that had been arranged for her.   Was she sad to leave her homeland?   Thrilled that she was to wed a king?   She would be his second wife, for he’d been wed to Isabelle of Hainaut when they were fifteen and ten years of age.  Ingeborg would have known that he had tried to repudiate Isabelle, claiming she could not give him an heir when she was all of fourteen years old; Isabelle had appealed to the French people for support and Philippe had relented, taken her back.  In five years, she’d had a daughter born dead, one sickly, surviving son, and several miscarriages, before dying herself at age twenty, after giving birth to stillborn twin sons.  Ingeborg would have been familiar with her predecessor’s sad history, but we do not know if it stirred flickerings of unease. 

Surely she would have worried, though, about the challenges of communicating with her new husband, for Philippe spoke no Danish and she spoke not a word of French.  She was well educated for a woman, and knew some Latin.   She must have been taken aback to learn that Philippe did not, for kings were expected to be literate in Latin, and she was doubtless troubled that the language  which was the voice of the Church, the verbal bridge linking the countries of Christendom, could not serve as a marital bridge, too. 

Even if she was anxious, she must have been excited, too, for it was a great destiny to be a queen—or so she would have been told.  And she would not be wedding a man much older than she, the fate of so many brides, for Philippe was twenty-eight and said  to have “an agreeable appearance and well-formed body,” although he was prematurely bald, having lost his hair when stricken with the mystery malady, Arnaldia, during the Third Crusade.  Philippe’s hated enemy, the English king Richard Lionheart had been stricken, too, with Arnaldia; while his hair had grown back, Philippe’s had not.  But it is not likely Ingeborg cared about that, for his bald pate was graced by a crown. 

The chroniclers did not see fit to tell us of their first meeting.  We can assume it was in public and brief, for this was their wedding day.   They would have exchanged their vows on the steps of the cathedral, before going inside for the Marriage Mass. Afterward, there would have been feasting, and finally their guests would have escorted them to their bridal chamber for the bawdy, bedding-down revelries.  There would have been ribald jests and loud laughter and then at last, they would be left alone, two strangers in their marital bed.

The next day Philippe’s new wife was to be crowned by his uncle, the Archbishop of Reims.  Witnesses would later report that Philippe seemed on edge, restless and uneasy, unusually pale for a man with a ruddy complexion.  Once the ceremony was done, he stunned his bride and guests with a shocking announcement.  The marriage was over, he declared, and he would at once seek to have it annulled.  Ingeborg, queen for a day, was taken from Amiens and confined at the monastery of Saint-Maur des Fosses near Paris.  Her nightmare had begun.  It was to endure for twenty years. 

Philippe would later insist that the marriage had never been consummated.  For now, he settled upon a claim of consanguinity, arguing that he and Ingeborg were fourth cousins and thus within the Church’s prohibited circle.   He convened a council of bishops and barons who met at Compiegne on November 5, 1193, where fifteen men swore that they were related within the forbidden decree; eight of the fifteen were Phillipe’s kinsmen and two others were members of the royal household.  But none challenged their testimony or the false genealogy offered in support of the claim.  Philippe’s uncle, the Archbishop of Reims, dutifully declared the marriage null and void.   And that was that.

Or it should have been.  Kings often used consanguinity as he did, suddenly dis-covering hither-to unknown blood ties to shed unwanted wives.  Philippe’s own father, Louis VII, had gained an annulment from his first wife on these very grounds; in his case, the discarded wife, better known as Eleanor of Aquitaine, would go on to prove that queens could have second acts—and second crowns.   Her son John would have no trouble ridding himself of his wife in order to wed the heiress of Angouleme.   The Duchess of Brittany and the Earl of Chester apparently used this claim, too, to end a marriage burdensome to them both.  Philippe surely expected that it would be no different for him.

But Ingeborg—now known by her new French name, Isambour—refused to be shipped back to Denmark like defective goods.   She swore that the marriage had indeed been consummated and they were man and wife in the eyes of God, the laws of Holy Church, and Philippe’s own realm.   When told of the verdict of the Compiegne council, she had no French to express her outrage, and so she resorted to Latin, crying out, “Mala Francia!   Roma!  Roma!”    She would appeal to the Pope to render justice, to recognize her as Philippe’s queen.  

Surprisingly, she garnered considerable sympathy, for the power resided with Philippe, not with a young girl banished to a convent.  But even Philippe’s own chroniclers, Rigord and William the Breton, defended his cast-off wife; Rigord called her “a very lovely girl, endowed with wondrous beauty, a holy girl, adorned with good customs, graced by outstanding generosity and great honesty.”   When Philippe imprisoned her at Cysoing, the Bishop of Tournai courageously came to her defense, calling her a precious pearl crushed by men. 

 

 

No one seems to have understood why the French king would have disavowed her like this.  There was much speculation, some wondering if she had foul breath, a hidden deformity, or if Philippe found she was not a virgin.  The English chroniclers believed that Philippe had made the match in order to use the Danish fleet in an invasion of England and they thought he’d ended the marriage because Ingeborg’s brother had refused to take part in it.   There were, of course, whispers of sorcery and the black arts.  I don’t doubt that Philippe’s marital woes were a source of amusement to his nemesis, Richard of England.  Richard was not exactly a candidate for Husband of the Year him-self, but compared to the tragic farce that Philippe’s marriage would become, he and his queen, Berengaria, seemed models of marital decorum.  

Unfortunately for Ingeborg, the current occupant of the Papal See was well into his eighties, well-meaning, but with hemp where his backbone ought to have been.  It was this same Celestine who allowed Richard, a crusader king, to be held a prisoner in Germany until an exorbitant ransom had been paid, even though men who’d taken the cross were under the protection of the Church.  Celestine would eventually excom-municate the smaller fish, the Duke of Austria, while not daring to censure the shark, Heinrich, the Holy Roman Emperor.  So it was not surprising that he took several years to act upon Ingeborg’s petition.  In 1195, he summoned up the courage to reject Philippe’s claim that the marriage was null and void, but the cardinal legates he dispatched to France found the French bishops feared their king more than they did their Pope. 

Philippe had begun looking for a new wife soon after the Compiegne council.  He discovered, though, that few highborn princesses were eager to risk Ingeborg’s fate.  He eventually settled on a German bride, Agnes of Meran, daughter of a Rhineland count, and they were wed in June, 1196.  The Pope refused to recognize the marriage, and even William the Breton, Philippe’s own chaplain, called Agnes “the concubine.”    Philippe treated her as his queen, while doing his best to break the spirits of his actual queen.  Ingeborg was kept isolated and suffered deprivations and indignities, denied doctors and priests, forced to sell her clothes and jewelry to pay bills, threatened by men she called “the heralds of the Anti-Christ.”   Her letters to the Pope are cries of despair.  But she continued to insist that she was Philippe’s wife. 

In 1198, her luck changed with the investiture of a new Pope, Innocent III; one of his first acts was to order Philippe to put Agnes aside and take Ingeborg back.  When Philippe refused, the Pope placed France under Interdict, but refrained from excom-municating Philippe or Agnes, for medieval Popes were politicians, too.  Philippe managed to get the Interdict lifted by faking a reconciliation with Ingeborg, although in reality, nothing changed; she remained his prisoner.  In 1201, Agnes died giving birth to a son, who did not long survive her;  Philippe got the Pope to legitimize their other children by arguing that he’d honestly believed he was free to wed Agnes.  He continued to refuse to restore Ingeborg, and now he tried a new tack, arguing that the marriage had not been consummated because Ingeborg had caused him to be impotent by casting a spell upon him.  Temporary impotence caused by sorcery was recognized grounds for dissolution of a marriage, but the Pope rejected this new claim and the impasse dragged on.

In 1212, Philippe finally admitted that the marriage had been consummated, but he claimed that there had been no insemination.  The Pope’s response was to exhort Philippe to spare him “insanities of this kind.”   And then in 1213, as abruptly as he’d disavowed her twenty years earlier, Philippe suddenly agreed to recognize Ingeborg as his queen. Why?   The most logical explanation is that he wanted to mend fences with the Church, for he was planning an invasion of England.   Whatever the reason, Ingeborg regained her freedom, although she and Philippe never lived together as man and wife.  After his death in 1223, I am happy to report that Ingeborg was well treated by her stepson and his son in turn.  She devoted her last years to good works and acts of piety, much like another royal widow, Berengaria, who never remarried after Richard’s death.  Ingeborg’s death date is in dispute, but Regine Pernoud, author of her only biography, Isambour, La Reine Captive, claims she died on July 29, 1236. 

Historians today are as baffled by Philippe’s behavior as his contemporaries were.  It has been suggested that he suffered from a nervous disorder resulting from his bout with Arnaldia in the Holy Land, but that is conjecture.  There has been speculation that they had some sort of incendiary quarrel or that she offended him with what Rigord  called her “great honesty.”  But these theories ignore the fact that neither spoke the other’s language.   So we can say only that whatever went wrong between Philippe and Ingeborg on the Wedding Night from Hell was obviously sexual in nature.    A more interesting question for me was why did Ingeborg persevere in the face of such abuse?  It certainly would have been easier to yield.  Unlike another rejected queen centuries later, she had no child to protect as Katherine of Aragon did.  We do know that she was very pious and very proud, so my own guess would be that she truly believed she was his wife in God’s Eyes and to say otherwise would be blasphemy.  She was certainly a courageous woman and apparently a forgiving one, for during her widowhood, she is said to have expended generous sums on prayers for Philippe’s soul.   Or maybe she just felt that he was in dire need of such prayers. 

I hope you’ve all found Ingeborg’s story to be as interesting as I did.  You can read more about her in Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe, edited by Anne Duggan, and in John Baldwin’s The Government of Philippe Augustus.  A number of her letters are also available for reading on-line at Epistolae - Medieval Women's Latin Lettes. 

 

Sharon Kay Penman’s latest medieval historical, LionHeart, will be released October 4^th.  This is her 13^th book and the fourth book in the Henry II Trilogy.  The Sunne in Splendour, her first book, was published in 1982.  Except for her Justin de Quincy Mysteries (there are currently four), all of her books have been medieval historicals.  Sharon does tremendous research—traveling to the locations where her stories take place in many cases—and what doesn’t make it into her books can be found at her blog at sharonkaypenman.com/blog.  You’re invited to visit her website at SharonKayPenman.com.    

 

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