Martin Schwartz

This article deals with the mercenary leader Martin Schwartz. For other people see Martin Schwarz .

Martin Schwartz (1450 - June 16, 1487 ) was a German mercenary leader who died at the Battle of Stoke in the Wars of the Roses while fighting for Lambert Simnel , a con man who claimed to be from the House of York .

Schwartz was born in Augsburg as the son of a shoemaker. He was first mentioned in 1475 in the army of Charles the Bold during the siege of Neuss . In 1486 he was hired by Maximilian I , who later became Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire , to liberate the Burgundian Netherlands from the French and suppress a rebellion in Flanders . For his services in the Burgundian Netherlands, he was knighted by Maximilian .

When John de la Pole, 1st Earl of Lincoln , learned that the English courts backed Simnel's claim, he went to the court of his aunt Margaret of Burgundy . She supported him financially and hired 1,500 German and Swiss mercenaries, whose command was Schwartz, for an invasion. Both the Earl of Lincoln and Schwartz died when the invading forces at Stoke were stopped by the army of King Henry VII .

literature

• Baldwin, David: Stoke Field. Pen & Sword, Barnsley, 2006, ISBN 1-84415-166-2 .
• Bennett, Michael: Lambert Simnel and the Battle of Stoke. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1987, ISBN 978-0312012137 .
• Trevor Royle: The Wars of the Rose, England's first civil war. Little Brown, London, 2009, ISBN 978-0-349-11790-4 , p. 423 ff.

Remarks

1. ^ Bennett, p. 63