New interpretations (1)

In late September 1297 Adolf of Nassau, King of the Germans, sent a letter to his ally Edward I. It translates, a little awkwardly as follows:

“'The lord king, my lord the lord king of Germany, notifies your magnificence that his men are ready for the campaign and that those troops are ravaging his own territory. Therefore, since my said lord, the lord king, awaits your councillors, who can advise him as to how and by which route he should proceed, he prays your lordship that you speedily send those councillors to him for that purpose, so that by their instructions he may so proceed without delay to carry them out in all respects with dispatch.”

The campaign in question was the war against Philip the Fair, King of France. Although he was King of Germany and titular Holy Roman Emperor, Adolf was poor and could only afford to fight the French thanks to large English subsidies granted to him by Edward. Upon receipt of £40,000 of English money, Adolf raised an army.

In his letter, Adolf refers to his troops ravaging their own land. This is probably a reference to one of the many neglected episodes in this war, passed over by Anglophone historians.

According to the Dominican annals of Colmar, Adolf had previously received a plea for help from the citizens of Arles. This was the chief city of Provence and once part of the greater kingdom of Arles. In the eleventh century the kingdom had been incorporated into the Holy Roman Empire, but by Adolf's day it had largely been subsumed by France. It did not, however, formally become part of the Kingdom of France until 1481.

The expansionist Capetian king, Philip the Fair, had designs on Arles. In the autumn of 1297 he sent troops to conquer the city, which was all part of his wider conflict against England and Germany. When Adolf heard of this, he sent part of his army to defend Arles against the French. His troops were led by Theobald, son of the Count of Ferrete, and one Werner de Hadstadt.

Adolf's men arrived in time to save the city. After several weeks of fighting, the French were repelled. Then, unfortunately, his troops got bored and started to pillage Arles. This would appear to the context of Adolf's letter to Edward in September.

Edward in turn had a vested interest in Arles. Twenty years earlier his mother, Eleanor of Provence, and her sister Margaret, had attempted to press their claim to the ancient kingdom. Margaret even raised an army for the purpose, and demanded that her nephew get involved. She eventually agreed to sell her right in exchange for a pension, but the Plantagenet interest in Arles remained. If Adolf could secure the city, he in turn would owe Edward a favour: after all, without English money he had no military capacity whatever.

It might have worked, but then Adolf lost control of his soldiers. The despairing citizens decided to switch allegiance and contacted Philip, asking him to rescue them from their rescuers. If he would send his officers to take over, they offered to lure Adolf's men into a trap and butcher the lot. This would save Philip the necessity of fighting a battle.

Naturally, the French king agreed. The trap was duly laid and most of Adolf's men slaughtered, including Theobald and his lieutenant Werner. Philip then sent his magistrates to secure Arles. Their first action was to arrest and execute certain 'traitors' inside the city, which didn't do much to endear the French to their new subjects.

Adolf, as I shall describe in Part Two, was far from done. The point of these posts is to cast a new perspective on this subject, which (in my opinion) has been totally misrepresented. Part of the problem is navel-gazing – the tendency to study one country and treat the rest as incidental – while another is the difficulty of the source material. Most of this information comes from quite obscure non-English language sources, and is difficult to extract. But if the effort is not made, we are left flailing about in the dark.

(Many thanks to Rich Price, as ever, for his translation work)
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