December 16 - Adelaide of Burgundy, sometimes called Alice, was born in Orbe (Urba) around the year 931. Daughter of King Rudolph II of Burgundy and Berthe of Swabia, she was married at a very young age to the Italian king Lothaire.

She soon found herself a widow, her husband having been poisoned in 950 by Berenger II, Marquis of Ivrea. The latter takes power in her place and imprisons her. But the queen succeeded in calling for help from the King of Germania Otto I who intervened and dethroned Berenger in September 951. Otto I, widowed since 946, married her to establish his influence over Italy. The couple had four children. In February 962, she is crowned empress with her husband by Pope John XII in Rome. She put her influence with the Emperor at the service of the Church and the poor. She favors the Cluniac reform.

Become a second widow in May 973, her disagreement with her daughter-in-law Theophano provoked a first distancing from the court by her son Otto II. After his death in December 983, she had to join forces with her daughter-in-law to take her grandson Otto III, still a minor, from the custody of Henry the Quarrelsome. From the death of Theophano in June 991 to Otto III's majority in 995, she was regent of the empire. We owe her the foundation of the double monastery of Seltz, where she retired and died on December 16, 999, the year her friend Gerbert d'Aurillac became pope under the name of Sylvester II.