Ansbertus (500?-570)

Individual Events and Attributes

Marriage

Individual Note

Ansbertus was a mythical Gallo-Roman Senator. It is proposed by some modern genealogists, that he is the son of Ferreolus, Senator of Narbonne and his wife Saint Dode. This would perhaps make him the great-grandson of Sigimerus (son of Clodius) and his wife a daughter of Ferreolus Tonantius,(a Roman Senator and Praetorian Prefect of Gaul).

The much later Liber Historiae Francorum states that an Ansbertus married Blithilde (also called Bilichilde), and that she was the daughter of "Lothar the father of Dagobert", and then continues the line to the Pippinids through his son Arnoald and his grand-daughter Itta (wife of Pepin of Landen).

Chronological Problems

William of Malmesbury in his History of the Kings of England, repeats the line, without naming his source.[1]

The chronological problems with the line as presented, have led modern genealogists to try to re-construct the line in various ways to fix them.

Marriage and issue

Some modern reconstructions posit that Ansbertus' wife must be, instead of a daughter of Lothar II, a daughter of Lothar I and make her the offspring of his brief relationship with Waldrada, proposing the following offspring:

Arnual or Arnoldus or Arnoald, Bishop of Metz and Margrave of Schelde

Saint Munderic, Bishop of Arisitum

Tarsicius or Tarsice

Erchinoald, mayor of the palace of Neustria

However the contemporary source The History of the Franks, by Gregory of Tours, our main source on the Merovingians during the time of this supposed union, does not ascribe to Waldrada any children by her brief unmarried relationship with Chlothar.[2]

NOTES:

1 "Chronicle of the Kings of England", William of Malmesbury, page 64

2 "The History of the Franks" IV.9, by Gregory of Tours

SOURCES:

"Europe after Rome : a new cultural history 500-1000", by Julia M H Smith, Oxford University Press 2005 : "The Carolingian dynasty...appropriated the Roman past into its ancestry by a genealogy that claimed that its sainted (and historically attested) founder, Arnulf of Metz (d.c. 643) was the grandson of the (mythical) Merovingian princess Blithild and her (equally mythical) husband Ansbert, hailed as a Roman senator."

The Royal Ancestry Bible Royal Ancestors of 300 Colonial American Families by Michel L. Call (chart 2074) ISBN 1-933194-22-7

Weis, Frederick Lewis Ancestral Roots of Certain American Colonist Who Came To America Before 1700 (7th ed.), lines 180 (all) & 190-9

New England Historic and Genealogical Register 101:112

Christian Settipani, Les Ancêtres de Charlemagne (France: Éditions Christian, 1989).

Christian Settipani, Continuite Gentilice et Continuite Familiale Dans Les Familles Senatoriales Romaines A L'epoque Imperiale, Mythe et Realite, Addenda I-III (juillet 2000-octobre 2002) (n.p.: Prosopographica et Genealogica, 2002).

Various Monumenta Germaniae Historica volumes (Leipzig: Verlag Karl W. Hiersemann, 1923–1925).²

Sources