Anais of Brienne

Anais von Brienne (* around 1205 , † after 1230 ) was a lover of the Sicilian king and Roman-German emperor Friedrich II.

Little is known about Anais. She was probably a daughter of Count Walter III. von Brienne († 1205) and the princess Elvira de Hauteville, a daughter of the Norman king Tankred of Sicily . Through her ancestor, King Roger II the Great , she was also distantly related to Emperor Friedrich II, who was a grandson of Rogers.

Anais probably spent her youth in the Holy Land , where her uncle, John of Brienne , was King of Jerusalem . In the summer of 1225 she came to Apulia as a member of the court of her cousin, Queen Isabella II of Jerusalem , who married Emperor Frederick II on November 9th in Brindisi . The emperor did not spend the wedding night with the childish Isabella, but instead seduced Anais, who was around twenty years old.

Later reports that Friedrich raped Anais are, however, attributed to anti-Staufer propaganda. A written by Friedrich to 1229 Kanzone has more indicative of a long love affair. In this poem, which the emperor wrote before his departure for the fifth crusade , he praised his lover as the "flower of Syria" ( alla fior di Soria ) and recognized that he would die if he did not steer his ship back to the port of his lover .

The daughter Blanchefleur (Biancofiore), who was born in the late summer of 1226, probably emerged from this relationship. She later joined the Dominican monastery of Montargis as a nun , where she died on June 20, 1279. A grave monument with a portrait of her can be seen there.

literature

• Uwe A. Oster: The women of Emperor Friedrich II. Piper-Verlag, Munich / Zurich 2009, ISBN 9783492257367 .