"We know almost nothing about the court of Lothair II simply because most of our sources devoted to him are in two particular categories. One—narrative sources describing the vulnerability of his own little kingdom in the middle of the west and the east Frankish kingdoms, where his uncles, Charles the Bald on the west and Louis the German on the east, were in fact casting their greedy eyes upon his kingdom with the hope of taking it. The other category of information is much more pertinent to this crystal, in that it is concerning the attempts Lothair II made to get rid of his wife Theutberga. He appears to have married her very soon after he inherited the throne, even though he had a long-standing mistress called Waldrada, from whom he had two children, a son and a daughter. When he married Theutberga she had no children, and she continued to bear no children, and Lothair appears to have decided Waldrada would be a better bet. So he recruited his two bishops, of Cologne and Trier, to have the marriage annulled, on the grounds of incest with Theutberga's brother."

Lothair's bid to divorce his wife and marry his mistress was no self-indulgent whim; he needed to have a legitimate heir. It was his only chance to preserve his inheritance and his kingdom. But royal divorce, then as now, was political dynamite.

The bishops of Cologne and Trier had actually obtained confessions from the Queen—possibly through torture—that she had committed incest with her brother, but Theutberga appealed to the Pope, who investigated the case and declared her innocent.