Frederick III, Duke of Lorraine

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Frederick III (French: Ferry) (1238 – December 31, 1302) was the duke of Lorraine from 1251 to his death. He was the only son and successor of Matthias II and Catherine of Limburg.

He was not yet thirteen years of age at the death of his father and his mother assumed the regency for his first few years. In 1255, he married Margaret, the daughter of King Theobald I of Navarre and Margaret of Bourbon. Though a Spanish king, Theobald was the thoroughly Gallic count of Champagne as well, and his daughters marriage signified the Gallicization of Lorraine and the beginnings of the tension between French and German influences which characterises its later history. When Joan I of Navarre, Margaret's niece, the daughter of her brother, Henry I of Navarre, married, Philip the Fair, the future king of France, in 1284, the ties to France grew. The long-held loyalt of her dukes to the Holy Roman Emperor had wanned in the first half of the thirteenth century and the French influence was pervasive until its reattachment to France in 1766.

During his reign, he fought the bishops of Metz until Pope Clement IV excommunicated him and put his duchy under an interdict. In 1257, the electors of the Holy Roman Emperor met at Frankfurt to elect a replacement for the antiking William II, Count of Holland, who had died in 1256. The electors could not agree and some, called the "English Party," elected Richard, Earl of Cornwall, the brother of Henry III of England, and opponent of the Hohenstaufen, like William. Some, however, elected Alfonso X of Castile, who was the grandson of the Hohenstaufen king Philip, whose daughter Beatriz was Alfonso's mother. That longstanding support for the established imperial dynasty (the Salian, Supplinburger, Staufen, and, briefly, Welf) came through in Lorraine again and Frederick fell in line with the maternally Hohenstaufen Alfonso. The rivalry between the two kings led to little actual combat and with both dead, the electors chose Rudolf of Hapsburg in 1273, reestablishing the kingdom as a unity.

[edit] Family

By his marriage to Margaret, he had the following issue:

Theobald (1263-1312), his successor in Lorraine
Matthias (d.1282), lord of Beauregard
Frederick (d.1299), bishop of Orléans (1297-1299)
Frederick (d.c.1320), lord of Plombiéres, Romont, and Brémoncourt
Gerard (known 1317)
Isabelle (d.1335), married (1287) Louis III, Duke of Lower Bavaria; then Lord Henry of Sully; and then (1306) Count Henry III of Vaudémont (d.1348)
Catherine, lady of Romont, married (1290) Conrad III (d.1350), count of Fribourg
Agnes, married John II (d.1302), sire of Harcourt