Troupe Alemande (1)

 

On this day in 1294 Adolf of Nassau, King of Germany and titular Holy Roman Emperor, formally declared war on Philip the Fair of France:

“Adolf, by the grace of God king of the Romans, forever august, to the noble sovereign lord Philip, king of France. Since the goods, possessions, laws and administration of justice, and territories of our empire have been held by your ancestors and yourself for so long as a result of unlawful occupation, having been appropriated without cause, the evidence of which being manifest in many and various places, we, being unable henceforth to ignore the truth of these matters under the guise of forbearance, inform you by these present letters that we intend to pursue the redress of such great injustices and to bring the forces within our power against you. Given at Nuremberg, on the 31st day of August in the year of our Lord 1294 and the third year of our reign”.

Philip's response was less grandiose. He sent a sheet of parchment to the German court with just two words written on it: 'Troupe Alemande', which translates as Stupid German. This was a gross insult, but Philip could get away with it. Despite his royal title, Adolf was virtually powerless, and had only been elected because he had no money. Thus the German electors could safely ignore him, or slap him about, as they wished.

The 'unlawful occupation' referred to Philip's policy of expanding the borders of Capetian France. Apart from invading Flanders and Gascony, he also sought to gobble up the border provinces of the empire. For several years he had been fighting a way by proxy in eastern Burgundy, the Franche-Comté, where Adolf and a coalition of Burgundian nobles defied French ambition.

Adolf's position improved when he agreed to ally with Edward I against France. This was formally agreed on 21 August, ten days before he sent his letter of defiance to Paris. The German king was promised a lavish English subsidy of £120,000, to be paid over in three installments. This money was to be used to raise an imperial army to fight the French.

Adolf's subsequent actions are murky, and the fine detail has to be extracted from non-English language sources. 

Gory executions

 

On this day in 1305 Sir William Wallace was executed with gruesome savagery at Smithfield. He was the second of Edward I's political enemies to be killed in this way, after Prince Dafydd of Wales in 1283, and the third criminal in England to suffer this form of execution. The first was a would-be assassin, name unknown, who had tried to murder Henry III in his bedchamber.

It is difficult to know, exactly, the motive for Wallace's barbarous execution. Unlike Dafydd, he had no personal relationship with the king. As a military commander, he posed significantly less threat than his fellow Guardians, all of whom Edward had pardoned and taken back into his peace. In terms of status, he was a mere knight, whose brief reputation and influence had been shot to pieces at Falkirk, seven years earlier. One might say – as many will – that Edward I was simply a vicious brute. If so, why did he pardon everyone else?

Perhaps the bare facts of Wallace's career are misleading. So much is implied by Edward's consistently hostile attitude towards the Scot. When the Guardians surrendered to the king, he insisted that several of them prove their loyalty by hunting down Wallace. On another occasion he informed Sir Alexander Abernethy, a Scot in English service, not to to accept Wallace's surrender on any terms. One English chronicler, Pierre Langtoft, even claimed that Wallace offered to surrender personally to the king, but was angrily rebuffed.

The final record of Edward's 'Ordinance' for the government of Scotland shows that all the Scots were permitted to submit on terms, with the sole exception of Wallace. He could only surrender unconditionally, which meant that Edward might – might – be persuaded to spare his life. Or not. Unsurprisingly, Wallace declined to accept.

So, to an extent, Wallace's reputation as an uncompromising resistance leader stems from Edward's unwillingness to let him surrender. Whatever unfathomable psychology was at work here, between two men who never met, is lost to history. 

We are all spies

 

In August 1273 Edward I swore the oath of homage and fealty to his cousin Philip III for the duchy of Gascony, the last substantial Plantagenet land holding in France. Via the Treaty of Paris, this made Edward the vassal of a fellow king, an unworkable relationship that bedevilled Anglo-French relations and led to the Hundred Years War.

While in Paris, Edward attempted to put an end to the damaging feud with the Montforts. His late father, Henry III, had requested that Earl Simon's widow, Eleanor, be admitted to royal grace. Edward complied with his father's instruction and made contact with Eleanor (also his aunt) conveying his wishes to put an end to their quarrel, receive her into his peace and grant her the income from her English estates. He helped Eleanor financially, loaning her £200 which she only repaid with difficulty.

For good measure, Edward also sorted out Eleanor's dower, a hideously complex business that went back decades to her first marriage. The Dunstable Annalist maintains that he returned all her dower lands, although Eleanor would only enjoy them for another twelve months. She died in May 1275, aged about 63, at the convent of Augustinian nuns of St Dominic at Montargis in France. The house had been founded by Earl Simon's sister and was the burial place of her mother, Alice de Montmorency, and other women with Montfort connections. Eleanor's outstanding debts, however, would not be paid off until 1286.

Right up until the end, Eleanor may well have been playing a double game. J Beverley-Smith, in his magisterial biography of Prince Llywelyn of Wales, argued the widowed countess had secretly received Welsh agents at Montargis:

“...the Montfortian sanctuary at Montargis had been a meeting-place for a confluence of influences calculated to secure a new link between the lineage of Simon de Montfort and the principality of Wales”.

One of the go-betweens was almost certainly Nicholas of Wantham, a key member of Eleanor's household who served as her proctor and executor. In 1286, years later, Nicholas was summoned to court at Oxford to answer charges that he had spied on the English court and passed state secrets to Prince Llywelyn in North Wales and the Montforts in France. Rather than face the charges, Nicholas fled into exile.

“From infancy on, we are all spies.” - John Updike

Government enforcers

After the battle or 'murder' of Evesham, Lord Edward's first move was to rush to Chester, to re-establish his authority there. The earldom of Chester was an extremely desirable bit of real estate. Simon de Montfort had been determined to get his paws on it, as was Robert de Ferrers, the 'wild and flighty' earl of Derby. 

When Edward was captured at the battle of Lewes in May 1264, his ally Prince Dafydd of Wales led an army of Marchers to defend Chester on the prince's behalf. They were roundly beaten in November by Ferrers, who raised an army to invade and seize the lordship for himself. Round One had gone to Ferrers, but he went down in Round Two to a sucker-punch from Simon, who lured the earl to London on inflated charges of treason and then threw him in the Tower. 

Round Three, played out at Evesham, was not so much a knockout as a wipe-out. Whether or not Edward meant to kill his godfather – at least one contemporary chronicler says otherwise – Simon ended up being exploded over a wide area. His head and testicles served as table decorations at Wigmore, one foot became the focus of a cult in Northumbria, another foot was sent as a gift to Prince Llywelyn of Wales, while one of his severed hands allegedly had the power to levitate during Mass. I forget what happened to the other. 

While at Chester, Edward was also concerned with wider affairs beyond the earldom. On 24 August he sent a letter asking the keepers of the royal wardrobe to see that Earl Warenne was empowered to receive the submission of the Cinque Ports. Warenne, sometimes portrayed as a nincompoop thanks to his defeat at Stirling Bridge in 1297, was in reality a brutally effective government enforcer. Anyone can lose a battle. 

Edward also asked that letters be drafted inviting the Montfortian garrison at Kenilworth to surrender. They refused and would hold out until December 1266. Interestingly, the heir to the throne also promised four men that they would continue to hold their lands freely. These were John and Richard Havering, William Turevile and Semanus de Stoke. 

Why Edward should have favoured these men in particular is unclear, but the order may imply he knew what was coming next. Disinheritance on a massive scale.

Vatatzes and the East (2)

 

In the 1960s a French historian, Claude Cahen (1909-91), published extracts of a Syrian chronicle by Ibn Natif, an Ayybubid official living in Syria in the early 13th century. Ibn Natif's work, combined with Latin and Greek writings of the period, can be used to piece together the military campaigns of John III Vatatzes against the Seljuq Turks. Under the year 622/1225, the chronicler states that the Sultan captured several fortresses in the course of a war against Vatatzes.

The sultan was Kayqubad I (reigned 1220-1237), sometimes styled Kayqubad the Great, whose reign represented the apogee of Seljuq power and influence in Anatolia. It seems Kayqubad and Vatatzes were well-matched. Under the year 1227, Ibn Natif records that war resumed between Nicea and the Turks, in which the sultan seized one of the emperor's 'great fortresses' after an eight-day siege. However, Vatatzes staged a counter-attack, defeated the Seljuqs and captured part of their army.

Independent confirmation of this account is found in the work of Nicodemus Hagiortes. He reports that in the fourth year of the emperor's reign (1225/26), Vatatzes waged successful warfare against the Seljuks, who had attacked Antioch and other cities along the upper Maendaer valley.

In the same year, Vatatzes sent an embassy laden with gifts to the sultan's other rival, al-Kamil, the Ayyubid sultan of Egypt. His intent was probably to open up another front against the Seljuks and force Kayqubad to fight two enemies at the same time.

Just to confuse matters further, another army appeared in 1227 on the Seljuk-Ayyubid frontier. These were the Khwarizmians, led by Jalal al-Din Mangburni. They initially allied with the Seljuks, which – along with Nicean gold – probably influenced al-Kamil's decision to side with Vatatzes.

Vatatzes and the East (1)

 

In 1225 Theodore Ducas, ruler of Epirus, attacked Thrace and expelled the garrison of John Vatatzes, emperor of Nicea. These two were vying over supremacy in the Roman world, after the fall of Constantinople to the Latins in 1204. Vatatzes failed to mount an immediate counter-attack, even though Thrace was the ancestral homeland of his family. 

This looks strange, since Vatatzes had previously adopted a policy of aggression: in 1224 he defeated a coalition of Latins and Anatolian Byzantine partisans at Poemanenum in Bythnia, before sending an advance guard under his 'protostrator', Ises, to seize the ancestral lands in the Hebrus (Maritza) Valley of Thrace. Instead of military action, Vatatzes ordered his Patriarch, Germanus II, to wage a propaganda war against the clergy of his rival, Theodore. 

This was not because Vatatzes wanted to avoid a fight, but due to the sudden appearance of a host of Seljuq Turks on his eastern frontier. Germanus, in one of his diatribes against Theodore's clergy, alluded to the impending campaign: 

“...I have established a new paradise for the church in Anatolia, and anointed as its protector a guardian with a blazing sword, the Autocrator John, united in spirit with the highest light, who now goes forth face-to-face to meet the faithless Agarenes..."

 The 'Agarenes', a term thought to derive from the biblical Hagar, an Egyptian slave woman in the book of Genesis, referred to the Turks.