On 20-Sep-17 2:49 AM, taf wrote: > The Menologium Cisterciense is said by 18th century Spanish ecclesiastical historian Enrique Flórez to have reported the following family group: > > Conradus, ex Sancia filia Alfonsi Magni Regis Castilliæ, genuit Luyfridum, Carolum, Conradum, Esmericum, Susannam, quæ locata est Brunoni Duci Saxoniæ, Emergardem, Adellam, Theodosinam. > > [Note: I assume this to be a reference to this publication: > https://books.google.com/books?id=lC5SAAAAcAAJ > but if so it is an erroneous citation, because Flórez says the entry is "die 7 Sept." but that day does not contain this entry, nor do I find it on adjacent days (nor, since it uses Roman/church dating, at 7 Calends Sept.), or any other day that names a Conrad or an Alfonso (as per the index).] > > Flórez describes this Conrad as Duke of Suevia, but the first Conrad of Swabia wasn't born until after Alfonso III died in 910 (his know children being adults at the time), while Bruno of Saxony died 30 years before Alfonso. All of it falls over a century before anyone was King of Castile. And the daughters' names seem an odd mix for this place and time. Does anyone recognize the German family being described here, or is this all just the anachronistic jumble it appears to be? The family is imaginary, and the source is the Spanish Cistercian historian Crisóstomo Henríquez in his *Menologium Cistertiense notationibus illustratum* (1630), p. 302 (see https://books.google.com.au/books?id=6boXCEk7mQwC). The date is the 7th day of September, i.e. 7 ides, not calends (that would be 26 August). The genealogy of the chronicler Otto of Freising given by Henríquez under this date was sent to him from Morimond abbey (in Champagne) where Otto had been abbot and where he died in 1158. The genealogy is stuffed full of nonsense, and it surprises me that Flórez would have been taken in by such a concoction. The names cannot be found together in any family from the 10th century, and the name Susanna for a wife of Bruno of Saxony is a give-away (as is the oddly stilted term 'locata' to indicate that she was married to him). Bruno's wife was not the daughter of a Sancha from Castile, and anyway families in the Frankish aristocracy did not conventionally use the name Susanna that was directly associated with adultery in the Bible, in the liturgy and famously in Carolingian iconography - the only proven example of this around the time in question is when it was assumed by Rozala, an Italian princess, when she was the widowed countess-regent of Flanders and (very briefly) Robert II's first queen. Why she took this name, and whether she took it as a change from the hypocorism Rozala (that presumably represents either a personal nickname or the diminutive of a proper name starting with the element Rot-, meaning red) or possibly as a reversion to a baptismal name she had been given in highly peculiar circumstances, is unknown. The names Esmeric and Theodosina are also outlandish in German lineage, while the form Emergarde [sic] is not much more plausible. Peter Stewart