"Who can translate some German for me? (Maximilian I)" Topic

I've been researching the War of Burgundian succession, and the forces of Maximilian in this period (1477-1494).

I've recently found reference to a Battle of Dournon in 1493.

Battle of Dournon, January 23, 1493, in which 4-5,000 French horse were defeated by Kappeller and his Germans, inferior in number, but possessed of cannon. They held a hollow way and withstood the repeated charges of the French cavalry.—Ulmann, Kaiser Maximilian I., i. 169.

link

Following the reference to Ulmann's book, I found it online here.

link

It's in German. Anyone want to translate a few paragraphs? The one dealing with Dournon seems to run from pages 168 to 171 of the original text.

I'd be very grateful if anyone wanted to translate it for me (though I can't offer anything other than gratitude).

There isn't much about this war in English, at least not details of actual conflicts and skirmishes, which is the sort of thing we love to read about right?

Cheers!

I'm sorry, Charlie, but that's way too much text to translate as a "favour".

I'd also need a much higher-res scan.

If a better quality version were available, I could probably run it through my CAT software and get a "better than Google translate" version, and then finesse any particular points?

Edit: I'll have a proper look tomorrow and see if I can extract and enhance the 3 pages you specifically mention. I missed that on my first parse, sorry.

I wouldn't advise anyone to do this without a seriously robust SDL Trados install and relevant termbases.

Oh sorry I should have been clear, I was just talking about translating one paragraph!! : )

(Though admittedly it is a long one)

I've had some success before translating some French text through Google, but ONLY by very carefully breaking it down and cleaning it up bit by bit, working out what certain unusual words actually mean ("gentlemen of war" meaning "men-at-arms", etc). A long process, the outcome still being a little suspect, but worth it for a general overview of meaning. However I can't seem to do it with this, as I haven't worked out how to copy and paste from this format, and the font is just too difficult to read to do it by typing it out myself (I did try!!)

@Charlie, I realised it was a paragraph after the initial 196 page shock :-)

I do promise you that I'll do my best this weekend!
I'm probably lucky enough to have more tools than most. Even the kinda low-res is probably solvable using an ultra-hi-res OCR app with some historic plugins. And yeah, I am a "proper translator". Real proper, init ,-)

Make sure to translate the footnote 1 on page 170 – it contains the sources of the pretty short reference to the battle, including some comparisons (five charges, reinforcements, etc, wrong dates). I fear that collecting these sources for a more detailed battle will surpass the resources of a hobby historian.

In short: Keppeler with 4-5000 cavalry and arquebus is trying to relieve Salins. A larger French contingent tries to intercept them. The besieged send out a small force to help Keppeler, find him, and manage to set up an ambush (guns covering a road, roadside covered by arquebus). The ambush works, but fighting continues for hours mainly with the French infantry. In the end the French withdraw, the relieve force gets through and Salins is kept (and remains imperial until ~1670).

The French wikipedia page has some numbers, but seems to be based on just one French source.
link

An old biography of Keppeler
link
has a poem on the battle, which speaks of 60 horse and 400 Landsknechts, and has some more detail on the battle).

@Puster
The French wikipedia – now that's a good idea! That's indeed a very interesting article, and they unsurprisingly have longer articles on other areas of this conflict I'm interested in. Google translate does well enough to give me a rough idea of what they are saying.