Immo (Lotharingian count)
Count Emmo, Immo or Immon, was the name of at least one important Lotharingian nobleman in the 10th century, described by medieval annalists as a cunning strategist.
The first record claimed for him shows him as a young noble granting land to a new vassal in the Condroz region in 934, a member of the entourage of Duke Gilbert of Lotharingia.
Kurth (1898) and Dierkens (1988) claimed that the first record of "Comte Immon" is in 934, where he appears in Waha, in Marche-en-Famenne as the brother of a Wibert, and relative of a Frederic.
During the Lotharingian rebellion of Duke Gilbert, which ended with the Battle of Andernach in 939, Widukind of Corvey describes Count Immo as "acute and exceptionally sly" (Latin "versutum et callidum nimis"), and Emperor Otto, who knew he was an important counselor to Gilbert, “decided it was better to use this man’s cunning rather than fight with arms”.
Thirdly, Widukind reported that after the Battle of Andernach, where Duke Gilbert died, two Lotharingian nobles named Ansfrid and Arnold, held the fortification of Chèvremont near Liège.
In 944, Regino of Prüm reports (944 MGH p. 162) that during a period of apparent unrest caused by the dead Duke Gilbert's Regnarid family, there was a complaint to the king from the chapter of Saint Servatius in Maastricht against a count Immo.
Historians see a possible connection with a grant made by the king to a faithful Rabangar, probably the owner of Ravengiersburg (de), near Koblenz.
A charter of King Otto orders his brother Bruno and Count Godfrey that they should give Chastre (near Namur), which Immo once had, to Tietbold their follower.
17 January 966, a royal charter states that a certain Rudolf's property at Gelmen (today divided between St Truiden and Heers, but then in the county of a Count Werner in the pagus of Hesbaye) had been confiscated because of his infidelity, and was now in hands of the Collegiate church of Maria in Aachen.
[12] In 968 Baerten believes it is the same count Immo again who appears in an important charter concerning the allodial lands of the Regnarids near Meerssen, granted by the widow of the late Duke Gilbert (d. 939) to the Abbey of Saint-Remi.
[13] Vanderkindere speculated that Count Immo in his later years, after the death of Werner in 973, might have taken over a county in the Hesbaye area near his possession of Gelmen.
[14] If this is read as describing two people, rather than a name and a nickname for example, then it implies that these two men were responsible for mustering soldiers in the Liège region.
However, records for these two counts from their proposed Rhine homelands are in fact very poor, so there is disagreement about how to distinguish them, and this can only be considered based on other information about probable connections of other members of the two families to those places.
In fact, it has also historically been proposed, for example by Léon Vanderkindere (1902), that these two are the same person, and even now the ancestry of the Ezzonid Erenfried II remains uncertain, whereas in the case of the son of Ricfried, nothing is certain except his parentage and siblings.
Alternatively, Vanderkindere, writing around 1900, and Baerten, in the 1960s, distinguished two counts, one who used the short name-forms such as Emmo or Immo and the other who used long forms such as Ehremfried.
On the other hand, in Gembloux there are signs of an Ehremfried related to the Abbot and the advocatus, who leads Aarts (1994 fn.103) to propose that the Ehremfried in the Hesbaye of this period might be distinct from both the son of Ricfrid or the father of Hermann: 11 April 961, an Ermenfried swapped a villa Steria monticula (Stier in Donceel) in Hesbaye for a church at Agioniscurta (Incourt) owned by the Abbey of Gembloux.
[19] Possibly the same Eremfried appears a few lines later in 964, where the advocatus of Gembloux, Goderan, is described as having a son Erenfried with his wife Adelinde (again, not called a count).
In a charter made in Capua, 26 July 982, "on the day that we fight the Saracens" Otto II certified that if a certain "Cunradus, son of the late count Rudolf" died, he wanted his possessions in Lotharingia to go to Gorze Abbey, and these included "curtis Velm in pago Haspongowe et in comitate Eremfridi comitis".
Jongbloed believes this shows that Eremfried was taking a rebellious position with Conrad, and can be equated to a rebel named Emmo mentioned in the Vita Brunonis altera in September 953, one month later.
