Guido of Namur

Guido von Namur , also Gui von Namur or Guy von Namur , (* around 1275 , † October 13, 1311 in Pavia , Italy ) was a military leader of the Flemish nobles in the Spore Battle of 1302 near Kortrijk . From 1296 to 1310 he called himself Count of Zeeland .

Life

Guido was the second son of Guidos von Dampierre , Count of Flanders , and his second wife Isabella von Luxemburg, around 1275. As a later born because of the primogeniture excluded from the succession as Count of Flanders , he had to look for a different livelihood and therefore embarked on a military career.

1291 he became engaged to Marie de Mortagne, heiress of the same name castellany in northern France with a castle , a strategically important position at the confluence of the Scheldt and Scarpe secured. However, since the French King Philip IV was against this connection, the engagement was finally broken in 1295.

After his father no longer recognized the feudal sovereignty of the French king over the county of Flanders in 1297 , Guido von Namur fought on the Flemish side against France. The allied with his father English King Edward I beat him in 1298 in Ghent for Ritter .

In 1299 he inherited parts of Zeeland from his father, to which the Count of Holland , namely the son of the half-brother of Guido's father, Johan II of Avesnes , also made a claim. Guido's half-sister Beatrix had received the land from Guido's first marriage to Mathilde de Bethunde as a dowry on the occasion of her wedding to Florens V , Count of Holland. However, her father had stipulated that the property should be returned to the Dampierre family if Beatrix's descendants were to become extinct. Since this was already the case with Beatrix's son Johann I , Beatrix's father withdrew the property and gave it to his son Guido von Namur. But John II of Avesnes , the successor of John I as Count of Holland, also claimed heir, although the Zeeland nobles did not recognize him, but Guido as Count of Zeeland. The latter was initially unable to devote himself more intensively to this conflict with the Dutch count, as his father and older brother Robert von Béthune were captured in the battle against the occupation of Flanders by French troops in 1300, and Guido henceforth led the battle at the head of the local population continued against the French king.

The Flemish uprisings reached their first bloody climax in the Bruges morning mass and culminated on July 11, 1302 in the battle of the spurs near Kortrijk. As commander of the troops from western Flanders, he and his nephew Wilhelm von Jülich, the younger , and his Zeeland ally Jan von Renesse played a decisive role in the fact that the French suffered a severe defeat in battle.

Battle of Zierikzee

After this success, Guido von Namur returned to the dispute with the Count of Holland over his property in Zeeland. He marched into Zeeland with soldiers and fought several smaller skirmishes with Dutch troops, all of which he was able to win. Only the port city of Zierikzee successfully resisted a siege . The conflict led to the Battle of Zierikzee on August 10 and 11, 1304 , in which Flemish troops and French and Dutch contingents on water and on land faced each other and the Flemings were ultimately defeated. Guido von Namur was taken prisoner by the French and brought to Paris .

According to the agreements of the Treaty of Athis-sur-Orge (today: Athis-Mons ), which was concluded in June 1305 between Philip IV and Robert de Béthune, Guido was released again and later had to renounce his rights in Zeeland. He then hired himself as a commander in the army of his cousin, the Roman-German king and later Emperor Henry VII. Together with his younger brother Henry I of Lodi, he took part with the imperial troops in the siege and capture of the Italian city of Brescia in the year 1311 part. In the same year, Guido also married Margarethe von Lothringen , the daughter of Theobald II , Duke of Lorraine , before he died shortly afterwards in Pavia of the plague with which he had been infected in the army camp .

literature

• C. van Peteghem: Gui de Flandre, comte de Zélande, et sa monnaie de Middelbourg . In: Revue belge de numismatique. Vol. 31, 1881, pp. 260–270 ( PDF ; 431 kB)
• Theo Luykx: Het grafelijk geslacht Dampierre en zijn strijd tegen Filips de Schone. Davidsfonds, Leuven 1952.

Web links

• Greet Verschatse : Een wapenschildje aan het paard van Gwijde van Namen on genealogieonline.nl (Dutch)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ G. Verschatse : Een wapenschildje aan het paard van Gwijde van Namen , p. 1.
2. ^ Family tree of the Counts of Flanders . In: Lexicon of the Middle Ages . Volume 9. dtv, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-423-59057-2 , p. 783.