Networking Nuns: Imperial Power and Family Alliances at S. Salvatore di Brescia (c. 837-61)

Female religious foundations in the early medieval period have long been recognized as essential ‘places of power’: physical and symbolic loci through which were created and consolidated the socio-economic prestige of aristocratic family groups, including the royal and imperial dynasties. This was especially true in Italy, where lay founders invested considerable resources in the nunneries, but perhaps even more so through the oblation of women from their family to become nuns there. This article explores a specific case study, that of San Salvatore di Brescia in northern Italy, in the 830s to the 870s. Founded as a ducal, then royal, monastery by Desiderius and Ansa, the last sovereigns of the Lombard kingdom, the abbey witnessed a flourishing period under Emperors Lothar I and Louis II. It then functioned as a government tool for expanding and imposing their authority, through the presence there of their own daughters, and of some women from the highest-ranking aristocracy of both Lombard and Frankish origins. The international dimension of San Salvatore in those years is well attested in its Liber Vitae (a. 856), which commemorates all the nuns, their male relatives and other contemporary personalities bound to them through direct and indirect links of fidelity. This success, argue the authors, was the result of both a bottom- and a top-driven process, through which the Lombard heritage of the abbey and its deep rooting in the local social and political landscape through the native elites, played a fundamental bridging role in connecting the first and the second generation of Frankish imperial officials in Italy with the original Lombard aristocracy.