General Notes

In a post to soc.genealogy.medieval, Todd Farmerie reports that Clemence Foix does not even exist.  I am keeping her as a place holder until further research indicates a possible replacement.  ##check ancestry.

From: Todd A. Farmerie (farmerie@@interfold.com)
Subject: Etiennette of Longwy - NOT!!!!
Newsgroups: soc.genealogy.medieval
Date: 2001-04-25 23:30:18 PST


I just got in the mail the latest publication of the Unit for Prosopographical Research - Prosopographica et Genealogica, vol.3, Onomastioque et Parente dans l'Occident medieval, K. S. B. Keats-Rohan and C. Settipani, eds. (2000).  I have not had a chance to read beyond the first couple of articles, but even the first one will be of interest to many in this group.  Szabolcs de Vajay here contributes a reevaluation of his elegant work on Etiennette/Estefania/Stephanie, wife of William, Count of Burgundy.

In a 1960 article appearing in Annales de Bourgogne, he evaluated the surviving sources, and focussed particularly on two contemporary ones that appeared to illuminate the question.  One of these indicated that Pope Callixte (son of Etiennette) was of mixed parentage, one parent being Burgundian, and the other from Lorraine.  The second source mentioned a Countess Ermesende of Longwy - taken to be the mother of Clemence, Countess of Luxembourg, and wife of William VII of Aquitaine.  Vajay was led to conclude that these two women, apparently both of Lorraine but with Mediteranean names, represented a single family group.  At about this time Longwy was held by an Adelbert, identified with the Duke of Lorraine, who was then tapped as father.  At the same time, the names Ermesende and Etiennette appeared in the family of Bernard Roger, Count of Foix (another sibling was Raimond, a name which Etiennette of Burgundy would give a son), so the mother of the Lorraine Ermesende and Etiennette was hypothesized as another sibling in this family, provisionally named Clemence (the name of daughters of both Ermesende and Etiennette).  Thus the question has stood for four decades (with only a few historians dissenting).  (Thus it has likewise appeared in secondary sources which failed to indicate the hypothetical nature of the solution, from which it has entered innumerable personal and public databases.)

In his new analysis, entitled "Parlons encore d'Etiennette" (pp. 2-6), Vajay goes through his previous proof, and step by step he destroys it.

The first source, describing the parentage of Callixte, is now known not to refer to the son of Etiennette, but to her grandson of the same name, who was son of Louis of Montbeliard and Ermesende of Burgundy - parentage that matches his described mixed origins.  The other source can now be shown to refer not to the mother of Clemence Countess of Luxembourg, but to her daughter Ermesende who married Adelbert de Dabo - the Adelbert of Longwy mistakenly associated with the Duke of Lorraine.  Taken together, there is no longer any support for a connection with Lorraine (and no reason to think that Duke Adelbert married or had any issue at all).  More critically, it becomes clear that with these two pieces of evidence removed from relevance, there is no contemporary source that bears dierctly on the question. 

One recent author, A. Beau, approached the question by returning to the work of Pere Anselme, who wrote that Etiennette was daughter of Raimond II of Barcelona and his wife Sancha of Navarre.  With minor modifications, this possibility is attractive.  The man Anselme appears to have had in mind was Count Berenger I Raimond II, who married Sancha Sanchez of Castile.  This Berenger is now thought to have had a sister Etiennette (for whom he might have named a daughter), while in his fourth wife (who Beau would make mother of our Etiennette) we have Guisla of Lluca, for whom Etiennette would have named her daughter Gisela, and this solution would also explain the use of Raimond.

Vajay is, however, not entirely enthusiastic about this solution.  First of all, Beau's reasoning that Anselme's account was likely based on an accurate tradition/source is belied by the fact that Beau then gives her a father Berenger and mother Guisla (with Berenger's first wife, Sancha, being from Castile), while Anselme had named them Raimond and Sancha of Navarre.  Likewise, this solution fails to explain the appearance of the name Clemence (unknown among the Barcelona Counts, although Guisla's ancestry is not fully characterized), while finally, there is the problem of the relationship between Henry, Count of Portugal and Raimond, Count of Galicia (Etiennette's son).

The word "congermanus" is used to describe the relationship between Henry and Raymond.  This word is usually used to refer to what we would now call second cousins or even more distant relations, the children (or descendants) of first cousins.  By Vajay's old solution, this would be the case, both being grandchildren's-grandchildren of Count Roger of Carcassonne, with Henry's mother postulated as daughter of Berenger and Guisla.  Moving Raimond's mother to the same family renders the two Counts first cousins, which is too close.  (Vajay would now instead place Henry's mother as sister of Berenger, but the problem remains.)  This can not be simply dismissed by suggesting that "congermanus" is being used somewhat atypically here to refer to first cousins, since Raimond's sister Sybil married Henry's brother Eudes and a marriage of first cousins (? once removed) certainly would have been considered too close.  In light of this, Vajay tends to dismiss this solution as well. 

He concludes by stating that the fate of his earlier theory should serve as a warning about the uncertain nature of such arguments based more on onomastics and hypothesis than direct proof. This is perhaps a good warning with which to start this book, as the articles that follow derive from a group of researchers that uses just such methods to reconstruct relationships among family groups.