Ep. 15 (152) - The (not so) Ugly Duchess Margarete Maultasch

The Holy Roman Empire 1250-1356

“The twelve-year-old Margarete, Princess of Carinthia and Tyrol, was travelling from her seat near Meran to Innsbruck for her wedding with the ten-year old Prince Johann of Bohemia. [..]

Still and serious she sat, in ceremonial pomp. Her bodice was so tight that she had had to be laced into it; her sleeves of heavy green satin, in the very extreme of fashion, fell to her feet ; she wore one of the new jeweled hair-nets which an express courier had had to bring from Flanders, where they had recently appeared. A heavy necklace sparkled on her bosom, and large rings on her fingers.

So she sat, serious and perspiring, weighed down with magnificence, between the peevish, grumbling women. She looked older than her twelve years. Her thick-set body with its short limbs supported a massive misshapen head. The forehead, indeed, was clear and candid, the eyes quick and shrewd, penetrating and sagacious ; but below the small flat nose an ape-like mouth thrust forward its enormous jaws and pendulous underlip. Her copper colored hair was coarse, wiry and dull, her skin patchy and of a dull greyish pallor.”

That is how the author Lion Feuchtwanger described Margarete, the countess of Tirol who is better known as Margarete Maultasch, the ugly duchess. This historic novel that became a huge bestseller in the 1920s describes how a bright and ambitious, but monstrously ugly woman is crushed by society’s habit to judge the inside of a person by its appearance.

I still have a copy of this book from the 1980s when I first read it, and on its cover is the same image I used for this episode’s artwork. The picture was painted by Quentin Matsys in 1513 and according to the National Gallery’s catalogue is called a Grotesque Old Woman.

It is not a portrait of Margarete Maultasch who had died 150 years earlier. The identification of the sitter as Margarete Maultasch goes back the idea of a postcard seller in Meran in the 1920s. Matsys picture also made its way into the depiction of the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland.

But it is all hokum. Chroniclers who knew Margarete personally, like Johann von Viktring either do not mention her appearance at all, or call her beautiful, if not extremely beautiful. So, as much as I love Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel, which btw. is available in an English translation, its premise is simply false.

The truth is much more interesting. Her actions to defend her inherited county of Tyrol were the changes that tilted the complex equilibrium between the Habsburgs, the Wittelsbachs and the House of Luxemburg out of kilter with unpredictable, violent results.

So, let’s find out why and how and what…