Guy de la Roche-Guyon

Guy de la Roche-Guyon (German: Guido ; † probably 1109) was a French lord of the castle in the early 12th century.

The assassination of Guy de la Roche-Guyon, depicted in the Chroniques de Saint-Denis , 14th century.

Guy was the lord of a strategically important castle that rose on a rock (French: Roche ) in an arch of the river Seine , located in the French Vexin directly on the border with the Norman Vexin, from which its importance grew. According to him, were the castle and the resulting at her feet place named. His descendants owned the castle at the end of the 15th century before the Silly family inherited it.

According to the spirit of that time, Guy's ancestors are said to have been real robber barons, but he himself appeared upright and law-abiding. Since the French Vexin had fallen to the crown in 1077, its lords were direct vassals of the king. Guy was married to the daughter of a neighboring Norman named Guillaume (Wilhelm), with whom he was close friends. Nevertheless, Guy was treacherously murdered by his father-in-law while attending church in or around 1109; his wife threw herself protectively on him and was also killed by her father's henchmen in the process.

This is what the Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis reports in his Vita Ludovici grossi regis as an instruction to his friend and King Ludwig VI. the fat one . With this and the murder of Count Karl von Flanders , which took place at the same time, Suger intended to show the king the moral decay of the Franconian castle and feudal nobility, which, in its deep squalor, did not shrink from feuds in close family circles. Contrary to this, Suger recognized the only legitimate and order-creating power in kingship, since this alone is empowered and capable of exercising rule and jurisdiction due to its authority, which was given directly by God .

literature

• Amy Livingstone, Out of Love for My Kin: Aristocratic Family Life in the Lands of the Loire, 1000-1200 (2010), 42-43

source

• Suger of Saint-Denis, The deeds of Louis the Fat , ed. by Richard Cusimano and John Moorhead (1992), pp. 76-80