Margaret, Countess of Tyrol
Margarete Maultasch (1318 – October 3, 1369 in Vienna) was the last Countess of Tyrol from the Meinhardiner dynasty. On her death, the County became united with the Habsburg patrimony.
She was the daughter of Henry, Duke of Carinthia and Count of Tyrol, whom she succeeded in Tyrol in 1335. Carinthia went to the Habsburg Albert II of Austria.
In 1330, she was married, at the age of twelve, to John Henry of Bohemia, son of John, Count of Luxembourg, who had deposed her father as King of Bohemia in 1310. Her husband was also the brother of the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. In 1341 she expelled her husband with the help of the Tyrolean aristocracy. She then married Louis V of Bavaria, the son of the Emperor Louis the Bavarian, without having been divorced from her previous husband.
William of Ockham and Marsilius of Padua defended this first "civil marriage" in the Middle Ages. The Pope, however, excommunicated her and her new husband and the scandal spread across Europe. In 1359, due in large part to the influence of her new Habsburg connections (from the marriage of her son to a Habsburg in 1358), Margarete and Ludwig were absolved from the excommunication. The annals and historians in Germany and Italy (Florence, Milan, Padua, Monza) refer to these incidents. In ecclesiastical propaganda, she received the nickname Maultasch (literally "Mouth Bag") which means "whore" or "ugly woman".
After the death of her husband in 1361, her son Meinhard III joined her as count of the Tyrol. However, he died in 1363, which induced her to give the county of Tyrol to her late son's brother-in-law, Duke Rudolf IV of Austria, who united it to the "dominion of Austria".
Her feudal heir would have been her elder cousin's son Frederick III of Trinacria, ruler of the island of Sicily. After his line, the succession would have gone in 1401 to Joan of Aragon, Countess of Foix, and in 1407 to Yolande of Aragon, Queen of Naples etc. (both of them daughters of John I, King of Aragon. Only in 1740 would that descent combine with the actual holders of Tirol, when Empress Maria Theresa, wife of Aragon's heir Francis III, Duke of Lorraine, succeeded in Tyrol too.
Her portrait was Sir John Tenniel's model for the "Duchess" in his illustrations of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Lion Feuchtwanger utilized her story in his novel The Ugly Duchess. In 1816 Jacob Grimm collected the Legends of Margarete in his book "German sagas".
Reference
- Wilhelm Baum: Margarete Maultasch. Erbin zwischen den Mächten, Graz-Wien-Köln 1994.