| Notes |
- The following from Chip Kalb
Agatha, the wife of Prince Edward of Wessex. She was originally listed as a German princess from the House of Billung, the daughter of a Frisian markgrave.
But it has been pointed out that her name, Agatha, was not German. It was not even popular in the Holy Roman Empire at the time of her birth. So where did Prince Edward find her? Either Hungary or Kyivska Rus’ ( now the Ukraine ). In those countries, Agatha was a popular name for Christian girls. It was a Greek name and it came from the Byzantine Empire, where Greek was the language of both the courts and churches at that time. For Hungary and Kyivska Rus’, Constantianople ( now Istanbul ), as the capital of the Byzantium, was like Rome so the Greek names were popular there. So how did Prince Edward get his bride from there? He didn’t have a choice — his father, King Edmund II “Ironsides” of the English, died in 1016 and Canute, the King of the Danelaw, had an army strong enough to put him on the throne and the King’s sons out of Wessex.
These facts are indisputable but what happened afterwards are not. The new King was supposed to have sent the old King’s sons to his half-brother ( or stepbrother ), the King of Sweden, Olof Skötkonung, in the hope that that King would have them killed. But King Olof was apparently peeved at being saddled with such an unpleasant task because he had the sons shipped off to either Poland, where Canute’s uncle was the Duke, or Kyivska Rus’, where Olof’s daughter was the Queen. Either way, the boys ended up in Hungary and that’s where Edward left in 1057 to go back to England. So which country was the birthplace of Agatha — Hungary or Kyivska Rus’? Good question. Edward is known to have come to Hungary from Kyivska Rus’ from Hungary in 1046 but his oldest child, St Margaret of Scotland, was born about a year before. And here things get really complicated. There are several different theories about the ancestry of Agatha and they would make a very long article, like the one for her at the English Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha,_wife_of_Edward_the_Exile ). But it’s pretty clear, from the naming patterns of her descendants, that Agatha was from either an Hungarian or a Kyivskan and that, as the contemporaries had claimed, she was a relative of the Holy Roman Emperors — Otto III, his cousin Conrad II, and the latter’s son Henry III.
And Edward could have stayed in Hungary for the rest of his life but he was always loyal to King András. However, in 1057, things got hairy between the King and his brother Prince Béla over the succession. Kyivska Rus’ was just chilln’ at that time so Edward could have gone there with his wife and children. But, at that moment, when the fur was flying through the air from all the places, Edward got the invitation from the King of England, the childless Edward the Confessor, to come home and be the Crown Prince. He decided that it was too good an opportunity to ignore so he high-tailed out of here with his wife and children. Unfortunately, he died as soon as he came home and that set off England’s own crisis of succession. He did have a son and heir, Edgar, but he was smart enough to know why the winner, William of Normandy, was called “The Conqueror” so he submitted — and lived to tell the tale.
|
1024 - 1066 (42 years)
[1] 
