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Updated: May 6, 2025
Lothair died in 1138. His son-in-law, the Wolf or Welf nobleman, Henry the Proud, Duke of Bavaria, whom Lothair had nominated as his successor, was opposed by the Swabian faction also known as the Waiblingen faction from the Franconian village in which the Swabian duke Frederick was born.
Rodolph had passed into Saxony, to assemble an army there, leaving Welf, the Duke of Bavaria, and the Lord Albert, to collect the forces of Suabia. Rodolph had taken with him the Baron of Stramen, with his son, and Gilbert de Hers.
There is, for instance, Waiblingen, a very ordinary-looking wayside station, yet what memories does that name recall! Memories of Hohenstaufen Emperors, Fredericks and Conrads, down to the last and luckless Conradin, memories of faction fights between the city republics of Italy, within the walls of those cities, between Guelph and Ghibelline, Welf and Waiblingen.
He had married one of his daughters, Matilda, to William of Normandy, afterwards the Conqueror; and another, Judith, to Tosti Godwinsson, the son of the great Earl Godwin of England. She afterwards married Welf, Duke of Bavaria; whereby, it may be, the blood of Baldwin of Flanders runs in the veins of Queen Victoria.
This is but another form of the name of the Welf family, who made most of the trouble for the Hohenstaufens in Germany. His son added to the family estates by marrying a rich north-German heiress. His grandson, Henry the Proud, looked still higher and became the son-in-law of the duke of Saxony and the heir to his great duchy.
Welf, Otto of Nordheim, Berthold of Carinthia, and Hugo, Count Palatine of Tübingen, were ready to support him with their lives, as they marched on proudly at the head of their vassals and soldiers.
In the meantime Henry used every artifice to raise another army; but such a panic had seized his adherents, that they declared they would rather be swallowed up in the earth than again encounter the Saxons. When Otto and Welf were thus assured of Henry's immediate inability to injure them, they disbanded the troops which had served them so gallantly.
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