Gerperga
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Gerperga was probably the name of one of four daughters of Desiderius, king of the Lombards, and his queen, Ansa. She was married to Charlemagne, king of the Franks, in 768, soon after Charlemagne's succession, probably to form a bond between the otherwise enemy states of Frankland and Lombardy. The marriage was annulled in 771 and this hurt relations with Lombardy, presaging the war of 774. She had no children and her ultimate fate is unknown.
There is no direct reference to her name in any primary sources. She was long called Desiderata (or Desiderada) in even scholarly work because of an editorial error in a 19th century copy of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica which capitalised the D in desideriata filiam (Latin for desired daughter). Even this error was sometimes compounded by a back formation to Desideria, a more probable first name (the feminine form of Desiderius, her father's name), or translated (as into French, Désirée). In the 1999 work After Rome's Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History, edited by Archibald C. Murray and Walter A. Goffart, Desiderius' daughter is hypothesised to have the name Gerperga, which will be used in this article. The reasoning used by the author hinges on the confusion that many contemporaries apparently had between her and Charlemagne's brother Carloman's wife Gerberga. Even Pope Stephen III seems to confuse the two and the chroniclers and annalists seem to believe that Gerberga fled, when her husband died, to the court of her father (she fled to Desiderius, who was definitely not her father). What is definite is that Desiderius and Ansa had three other daughters named Anselperga, Adelperga, and Liutperga. The commonality in the names of their daughters is the ending "-perga". Based on this, the author believes the confusion was caused because the two queens (wives of the two brothers Charles and Carloman) had the same name, namely Gerberga or Gerperga, which are respectively the Frankish and Lombard versions of the modern French name Gerberge.
