For a long time he refused to cede his suffragan Diocese of Bremen to Ansgar who, in order to facilitate his missionary labours, desired to unite it with his Archdiocese of Hamburg.
[1] According to Johann Peter Kirsch, in 856 Ingiltrud, wife of Count Boso the Elder, had left her husband for one of his vassals.
[6] The Vita Sancti Deicoli says that Waldrada was related to Eberhard II, Count of Nordgau (included Strasbourg) family of Etichonids.
At a synod held at Aachen in January, and another in February, 860, a few bishops and abbots, under the leadership of Gunther, compelled Teutberga to declare that before her marriage with the king she had been violated by her brother.
At a third synod held at Aachen in April, 862, Gunther and a few other Lorraine bishops allowed the king to marry his concubine Waldrada.
Nicholas I sent two legates to investigate the case, but the king bribed them, and at a synod which they held in Metz, in June, 863, the divorce was approved.
The pope, however, did not waver even when Emperor Louis II appeared before Rome with an army for the purpose of forcing him to withdraw the ban of excommunication from the archbishops.
Thietgaud was now freed from the ban, but Gunther remained excommunicated until the summer of 869, when, after a public retraction (P. L., CXXI, 381), he was admitted by the pope to lay communion at Monte Cassino abbey.