Margarete Maultasch
Encyclopedia : M : MA : MAR : Margarete Maultasch
Margarete Maultasch (1318 – October 3, 1369 in Vienna) was the last Countess of Tyrol from the Meinhardiner dynasty.
She was the daughter of Henry, Duke of Carinthia and Count of Tyrol, whom she succeeded in Tyrol in 1335. Carinthia went to the Habsburg Albert II of Austria.
In 1330, she was married, as a child, to John Henry of Bohemia, the brother of the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV of Luxemburg. In 1341 she expelled her husband with the help of the Tyrolean aristocracy. She then married Louis V of Bavaria, the son of the Emperor Louis the Bavarian, without having been divorced from her previous husband.
William of Ockham and Marsilius of Padua defended this first "civil marriage" in the Middle Ages. The Pope, however, excommunicated her and the scandal spread across Europe. In 1359 Margarete and Ludwig were absolved from the excommunication. The annals and historians in Germany and Italy (Florence, Milan, Padua, Monza) refer to these incidents. In ecclesiastical propaganda, she received the nickname Maultasch (literally "Mouth Bag") which means "whore" or "ugly woman".
After the death of her husband, her son Meinhard III joined her as count of the Tyrol. However, he died in 1363, which induced her to give the county of Tyrol to Duke Rudolf IV of Austria, who united it to the "dominion of Austria".
Her feudal heir would have been her elder cousin's son Frederick III of Trinacria, ruler of the island of Sicily. After his line, the succession were to go in 1401 to Joan of Aragon, countess of Foix, and in 1407 to Yolande of Aragon, Queen of Naples etc. Only in 1741 would that descent combine with the actual holders of Tirol, as Maria Theresa, wife of Aragon's heir Francis of Lorraine, succeeded in Tirol too.
Her portrait was Sir John Tenniel's model for the "Duchess" in his illustrations of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Lion Feuchtwanger utilized her story in his novel The Ugly Duchess. In 1816 Jacob Grimm collected the Legends of Margarete in his book "German sagas".
|-
| width="30%" align="center" | Preceded by:
Henry
| width="40%" align="center" | Countess of Tyrol
Co-rulers:
John Henry (1335-1341)
Louis (1341-1361)
Meinhard III (1361-1363)
| width="30%" align="center" | Succeeded by:
Rudolf IV of Austria
|}
Reference
- Wilhelm Baum: Margarete Maultasch. Erbin zwischen den Mächten, Graz-Wien-Köln 1994.
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.