asking those present "from whom the does he have the empire, if not from our lord the pope?" The two ecclesiasts were then nearly beaten up, but the Emperor enabled their swift escape. Retranslation In June 1158, representatives of both sides met in the Imperial town of Augsburg. Adrian attempted to pacify the Emperor and claimed that he meant, not "fief", but "good deed": "Among us beneficium means not a fief but a good deed", he wrote. Barber suggests, though, that "his explanation was far from convincing". On the other hand, notes the Emperor's biographer John Freed, Barbarossa was illiterate, and required everything translated. He was thus in constant danger of relying on mistranslations, and it is possible that this happened at Besançon. Taken at face value, this phrase appeared to assert that Adrian was the Emperor's feudal overlord. Latowsky argues that the mistranslation was a deliberate ploy by Barbarossa's Archchancellor Rainald of Dassel—whom she describes as a "multilingual provocateur"—whose Chancery was waging a propaganda war against Adrian. The Pope had earlier condemned Reinauld's election as Archbishop of Cologne believed Rainauld to be nothing less than the Devil's agent. Latowsky suggests that Rainauld had intended to cause trouble between Emperor and Pope. If this was the case, he succeeded, as Barbarossa was only just restrained from sending an army against Adrian. The Emperor did make a public declaration against Adrian, though, calling for his deposition on the grounds that, as the son of a priest, he was an uncanonical pope. Ullmann notes that canonicity "was indubitably a double-edged weapon; if Adrian was an uncanonical pope, then Frederick was an uncanonical emperor, and that seems the only reason why this point was not pressed further". Duggan summarises Adrian's Augsburg letter as being concomitant to one's interpretation of the original offence, noting that "the context...determines everything". While Munz views the Augsburg outcome as a "humiliating" retreat by Adrian, Duggan argues that, if one does not view the Besançon letter as deliberately provocative, "then there was no withdrawal from that provocation". Adrian's choice of words may also have been a "calculated ambiguity", suggests Abulafia, and in the event, Adrian never publicly acknowledged which of the interpretations he had actually intended. This would have allowed him to suggest the Emperor has misunderstood him while allowing the Pope to intimate to his own church that the Emperor was indeed a Papal vassal. Adrian "trivialised" Barbarossa's