Nielsen Hayden genealogy

Guy de Montfort

Male Abt 1253 - 1291  (~ 38 years)


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  • Name Guy de Montfort 
    Birth Abt 1253  [1
    Gender Male 
    Death 1291  Sicily Find all individuals with events at this location  [1
    Person ID I28755  Ancestry of PNH, TNH, and others
    Last Modified 14 Jun 2020 

    Father Simon VI de Montfort,   b. Between 1208 and 1209   d. 4 Aug 1265, Evesham, Worcestershire, England Find all individuals with events at this location (Age ~ 57 years) 
    Mother Eleanor of England,   b. 1215   d. 13 Apr 1275, Montargis Abbey, Loiret, France Find all individuals with events at this location (Age 60 years) 
    Marriage 7 Jan 1238  Westminster, Middlesex, England Find all individuals with events at this location  [1
    Family ID F17129  Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

    Family Margherita Aldobranderschi 
    Children 
    +1. Anastasia de Montfort,   b. Abt 1274
    Family ID F17127  Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
    Last Modified 14 Jun 2020 

  • Notes 
    • Count of Nola.

      From Wikipedia (accessed 14 Jun 2020):

      He participated in the Battle of Evesham against the royalist forces of his uncle, King Henry III of England, and his cousin, Prince Edward. Both his father and elder brother were traumatically killed during the disastrous battle. Guy de Montfort was seriously wounded and captured.

      He was held at Windsor Castle until spring 1266, when he bribed his captors and escaped to France to rejoin his exiled family. Guy and his brother, Simon the Younger, wandered across Europe for several years, eventually making their way to Italy.

      Guy took service with Charles of Anjou, serving as his Vicar-General in Tuscany. He distinguished himself at the Battle of Tagliacozzo and was given Nola by Charles of Anjou.

      In 1271, Guy and Simon discovered that their cousin Henry of Almain (son of Richard, Earl of Cornwall) was in Viterbo at the church of San Silvestro. In revenge for the deaths of their father and brother at Evesham, on 13 March 1271, Guy and Simon murdered Henry while he clutched the altar, begging for mercy. "You had no mercy for my father and brothers", was Guy's reply. This murder was carried out in the presence of the Cardinals (who were conducting a papal Election), of King Philip III of France, and of King Charles of Sicily. For this crime the Montfort brothers were excommunicated, and Dante banished Guy to the river of boiling blood in the seventh circle of his Inferno (Canto XII).

      The news reached England, and King Edward I dispatched a clerk of the royal household to inform the northern counties and Scotland about the excommunication. Pope Gregory X wrote a letter (29 November 1273) to King Edward from Lyons, where he was preparing for an ecumenical council, that Cardinal Riccardo Annibaldi and Cardinal Giovanni Orsini were still in Rome and had been ordered to find a secure place of imprisonment in the territories of the Church for Guy de Montfort.

      Simon died later that year at Siena, "cursed by God, a wanderer and a fugitive". Guy was stripped of his titles and took service with Charles of Anjou again, but was captured off the coast of Sicily in 1287 by the Aragonese at the Battle of the Counts. He died in a Sicilian prison.

  • Sources 
    1. [S49] Genealogics by Leo Van de Pas, continued by Ian Fettes and Leslie Mahler.