Most of these great men find a place in a narrative which I will give here for the sake of its connection with the classical studies of St. Gall, and which is related by Ekkehard junior in his chronicle of the abbey. Hedwiga, daughter to Duke Henry of Bavaria, was at that time the reigning Duchess of Swabia, having been left a widow by the death of her husband Duke Burkhard. She was a woman of wonderful beauty, but of so severe and imperious a temper as to be held in terror through all the surrounding provinces. In her youth she had been promised in marriage to the Greek prince, Constantine, who sent a cunning artist to take the portrait of his future bride, and at the same time to instruct her in Greek literature. But Hedwiga, not admiring the Greek alliance, made such terrible contortions of her fair nose and eyebrows whenever the painter applied himself to his task, that his efforts at a likeness proved fruitless, and the marriage was broken off in consequence. From the Greek painter, however, Hedwiga had acquired a very fair proportion of Greek scholarship, and on her marriage with Burkhard, she likewise applied herself to the study of Latin. She was a frequent visitor to the abbey of St. Gall, where her nephew, Burkhard, was then abbot, and in return for her splendid gifts, insisted on nothing less than that the abbot should make over to her, as tutor, the hapless Ekkehard Palatinus, who then filled the office of porter, and was known to be an excellent scholar in both languages. The abbot very unwillingly consented to her demand, and poor Ekkehard had to pay frequent visits to the castle of Dwellia, where, in spite of the beauty and talents of his fair disciple, her sharp temper and exasperating ways often made his office a hard one. Once, when out of humility he had begged that a certain canopy erected over his bed might be taken down, the wrathful duchess ordered the servant who had executed the order to be flogged, and would have cut off his head had it not been for the entreaties of the master. However, she had an open hand, though a somewhat heavy one, and bestowed liberal gifts on the monks of St. Gall, in the shape of embroidered copes and chasubles. But even in her bounty she showed the same wilful disposition, for having once given them a very rich dalmatic, cunningly worked in fine gold, and representing the espousals of Mercury and Philology, she took it away again in dudgeon at the refusal of Abbot Immo to let her have the antiphonary on which she had set her heart.