| Notes |
- #Générale#Giso was born about 1070. He was first mentioned in 1099 as the son of Mechtild, whose second marriage was to Adalbert von Saffenberg, Graf von Nörvenich, and who was first married to either Giso II or Giso III von Gudensberg (whose origins are not known with certainty).
Giso was Graf im Oberlahngau and from 1122 Graf von Gudensberg in Lower Hessen and Bearer of the Imperial Banner. The house of the so-called Gisonen reached its high point with him, in terms of estates and stewardships held.
Through his marriage between 1096 and 1099 with Kunigunde von Bilstein, daughter of Rugger II, Graf von Bilstein, and a daughter of Werner III, Graf von Gudensberg, Giso added to the estates and rights inherited from his father large estates and stewardship rights in the districts of Werra and Oberlahn, and on the Rhine, including the stewardships over the abbey of Hersfeld and the cathedral of St. Florin in Koblenz. Giso and Kunigunde had two children, Giso V and Hedwig, of whom the latter would have progeny, marrying Ludwig I, Landgraf von Thüringen.
As well as Werner IV 'von Grüningen', Graf von Gudensberg, with whom he is often mentioned in source documents, Giso was one of the closest followers and confidants of Emperor Heinrich IV. Even after Heinrich's abdication, forced on him by his son Heinrich V at the end of 1105, Giso remained loyal to the emperor. Thus in 1114 he moved against Archbishop Friedrich I of Cologne who was on the pope's side in the Investiture Dispute. Then both he and Werner IV changed sides. Between 1115 and 1118 both counts progressively offered all imperial estates under their jurisdictions in Upper and Lower Hessen, including the Gisonen home castle of Hollende, as fiefs to Archbishop Adalbert of Mainz, an avowed opponent of the emperor in the Investiture Dispute. With that, Mainz's goal, to gain a substantial and preferably closed territory in Hessen, moved much closer to fruition.
When Werner IV von Grüningen died without heirs on 22 February 1121, Giso became his heir, presumably on grounds of his marriage with Kunigunde von Bilstein; that year Giso was mentioned as 'comes de Udenesberc' (Graf von Gudensberg) in a document.
Giso died on 12 March 1122. It is not certain whether his wife Kunigunde was heir to Werner because of the Bilstein claims and thereby brought the county of Maden-Gudensberg as well as the position of Imperial Banner Bearer to Giso. This is generally assumed to be the case, because after Giso's death and until the majority of his son Giso, his stepfather Henrich Raspe I, who had married Kunigunde in 1223, held the office of Imperial Banner Bearer.
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1170 - 1122