Poppa of Bayeux

Statue of Poppa of Bayeux, Place de Gaulle, Bayeux.

Poppa of Bayeux was the Christian wife or mistress[1] (perhaps more danico)[2] of the Viking conqueror Rollo. She was the mother of William I Longsword and grandmother of Richard the Fearless, who forged the Duchy of Normandy into a great fief of medieval France.[3] Dudo of Saint-Quentin, in his panegyric of the Norman dukes, describes her as the daughter of a "Count Berengar", the dominant prince of that region, who was captured at Bayeux by Rollo in 885 or 889.[4] This has led to speculation that she was the daughter of Berengar II of Neustria. Despite the uncertainty of her parentage, she undoubtedly was a member of the Frankish aristocracy.[5] A statue of Poppa stands at the Place de Gaulle in Bayeux.

References

  1. ↑ Stewart Baldwin, F.A.S.G., Henry Project:"Poppa"
  2. ↑ Philip Lyndon Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage during the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods (E.J. Brill, Leiden, New York, 1994), pp. 110-111
  3. ↑ Eleanor Searle, Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, 840–1066 (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1988), p. 89
  4. ↑ Douglas, 'Rollo of Normandy', p. 417
  5. ↑ Neveux, pp. 60-1
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Sunday, February 14, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.