during their lifetimes. But there were territorial gains, and by 987 it was possible to begin rebuilding destroyed fortresses along the Elbe". A Saxon army, with Otto III's presence, took Brandenburg in 991. The reports that there was another expedition in 992. Thietmar of Merseburg reports that Otto III dismissed his grandmother after his mother's death but Althoff doubts this story. Even after Otto attained majority, Adelaide often accompanied him in his travels and influenced him together with other women. In Burgundy, her homeland, the counts and castellans behaved increasingly independently from their king Rudolph III. Just before her death in 999, she had to intervene in Burgundy to restore peace. Later years Adelaide resigned as regent when Otto III was declared of legal majority in 995 and from then on devoted herself exclusively to her works of charity, in particular to the foundation and restoration of religious houses: monasteries, churches and abbeys. Adelaide had long entertained close relations with Cluny, then the center of the movement for ecclesiastical reform, and in particular with its abbots Majolus and Odilo. She retired to a nunnery she had founded in c. 991 at Selz in Alsace. On her way to Burgundy to support her nephew Rudolf III against a rebellion, she died at Selz Abbey on 16 December 999, days short of the millennium she thought would bring the Second Coming of Christ. She was buried in the Abbey and Pope Urban II canonized her in 1097. Although after serious flooding, which almost completely destroyed it in 1307, Adelaide's relics were moved to a new Abbey elsewhere. A goblet reputed to have belonged to the Saint has long been preserved in Seltz.; it was used to give potions to people with fever and the healings were said to have been numerous. Adelaide had constantly devoted herself to the service of the church and peace, and to the empire as guardian of both; she also interested herself in the conversion of the Slavs. She was thus a principal agent — almost an embodiment — of the work of the pre-schism Church at the end of the Early Middle Ages in the construction of the religious culture of Central Europe. Some of her relics are preserved in a shrine in Hanover. Her feast day, 16 December, is still kept in many German dioceses. Issue In 947, Adelaide was married to King Lothair II of