Note 433 — Chapter XII · WILLIAM THE LION—1165–1214.

Ben. Ab. 1184. Strictly speaking, Matilda was no longer duchess of Saxony, as her husband, Henry the Lion, had been forfeited five years previously by the Emperor Frederic, who gave his duchy of Saxony to Bernard of Anhalt, son of Albert the Bear, first Margrave of Brandenburg. But Bernard never made good his claims over the Saxons on the Weser, the tenants of the Allodial lands to which Henry had succeeded in right of his mother Gertrude, heiress of the Saxon Emperor Lothaire.