COURTRAI 1302
Date: 11 July 1302.
Location: Courtrai is 27 miles south-west of Ghent (Route 14 (E 3))
The battlefield lies near the Groeninghebeke stream. 14.
War and campaign: Flemish Revolt against the French
Object of the action: The French were trying to relieve their garrison in the town.
Opposing sides: (a) Guy of Namur and William of Juliers leading the Flemish insurgents, (4) The Count of Artois commanding the French army.
Forces engaged: (a) Flemings: details uncertain, but mostly pikemen. Total: perhaps 12,000. (A) French: details uncertain, but a large number mounted. Total: perhaps 15,000.
Casualties: (a) Uncertain, but not heavy, (b) 63 nobles; 700 knights.
Result: Defeat of the French expedition.
In May 1302 the Flemings arose in revolt against King Philip of France, who had imprisoned their Count and annexed his lands. Courtrai was one of the few towns the French succeeded in retaining. The Flemish army fell back to Courtrai when Count Robert of Artois invaded the country with a royal French army, composed of the feudal array of north France, Italian mercenaries and Gascon javelin soldiers.
The Battle of the Golden Spurs (Dutch: Guldensporenslag, French: Bataille des éperons d’or or Battle of Courtrai) was fought on July 11, 1302, near Kortrijk in Flanders.
The ferocious Flemish mercenaries who plagued England in the twelfth century had long since faded from the scene. The infantry troops of fourteenth-century Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres were quite different from their predecessors. Organized largely along guild lines into regular, uniformed militias, they were surprisingly well equipped, typically protected by mail haubergeons, steel helmets, gauntlets, shields, and often even coats of plates, and armed with bows, crossbows, pikes, orgoedendags. These unique weapons (the name means ‘hello’ or ‘good day’) consisted of a thick, heavy wooden staff four to five feet in length, tipped with a lethal steel spike. Many of the militiamen thus armed had seen repeated service during the last decade of the previous century, thanks to the frequent conflicts between Flanders, Hainault, and Holland, and deserve to be considered veterans.
Their experiences in those campaigns, however, did not include anything like what they had to face on the hot summer afternoon of 11 July 1302. In that year the cities of Flanders, with the exception of Ghent, were in rebellion against the King of France, who had therefore dispatched an army of 2,500 men-at-arms and 8,000 infantry to break their siege of Courtrai castle, rescue the beleaguered French garrison, and suppress the revolt. King Philip probably did not anticipate that this task would involve a battle, for the Capetian army was incomparably superior to the Flemings in men-at-arms, and heavy cavalry was the acknowledged arbiter of battlefield victory or defeat. Yet, when the French troopers approached the encircled town, their enemies did not flee before them or retire behind protective fortifications. Instead, they withdrew to a carefully selected position on marshy ground outside the city, a spot where streams and ditches posed an obstacle to any attacker and protected their flanks, then drew up in battle formations with the River Lys at their backs and stood ready to greet their adversaries.
The communal infantry were ordered in four divisions, with three in line and a fourth in reserve positioned to block a sally by the besieged garrison. The soldiers were packed into a dense array, about eight deep, grouped by region and craft so that each man knew his comrades well, a factor understood to enhance morale and cohesion. Their goedendags, supplemented by longer pikes in the foremost row, made a bristling hedge of wood and steel in front of them. Broad rectangular banners marked the positions of the various guilds here a hammer, there a mason’s trowel, over there a ship. Farther forward towards the French, archers and crossbowmen were dispersed.
The resolute appearance of the militiamen was enough to give pause to some of their enemies. Ina council of war, one French leader suggested breaking up the Flemish formation with crossbow fire; another advised simply letting the townsmen stay where they were until they were exhausted by standing, fully armed, in the hot sun. The majority, however, saw the situation as an unexpected opportunity to gain a decisive victory of just the sort of which Dubois had lamented the rarity. They insisted on a quick attack, lest the Flemings change their minds. So, early in the afternoon, the crossbowmen of the Capetian host advanced to engage their opposite numbers with long-range missile fire. They had largely succeeded in driving the Flemish skirmishers back behind the shelter of the heavy infantry when Robert of Artois, the French commander, ordered his cavalry forward.
Aside from their lances and swords and the great helms which covered their entire faces, the French men-at-arms were not equipped very differently from the men who awaited them on foot. There were, however, two critically important distinctions between the forces about to come to blows. First, the men-at-arms, whether knights or esquires, were nobles, members of the second order, the bellatores, whose primary raison d’etre (according to medieval political theory) was making war. Second, they were mounted on large, powerful warhorses, protected by ‘trappers’ of thick-quilted cloth, or even by mail, and painstakingly trained to charge straight forward even into a seemingly solid line of men or other horses. The stallions, like the proud men atop them, had come to assume that infantry would not stand against them, that the wall of flesh and bone which stood facing them would dissolve before they smashed into it. Then, once they had broken into the enemy formation, the men-at-arms would be riding high above a milling mass of panicky shopkeepers and artisans, who would benefit from their numbers no more than a dozen sheep beset by four wolves.
The same images would doubtless have run through the minds of many of the militiamen. Yet these were not raw levies with no experience of war, and they knew that, with a river at their backs, they could not save themselves by flight. They had nothing to gain by breaking their formation, and everything to lose, for everyone knew that an unwavering array was the key to victory. So they stood steady in their tightly formed ranks: they stood and watched the chivalry of the most powerful nation in Europe form into line, banners and pennons unfurled, trumpets blaring, steel flashing. It is difficult to imagine the sound of 2,500 heavy horses trotting forward all at once, but surely the thunder of their hooves, blended into a cacophonous din with the war cries of the riders Montjoye! St Denis!-must have struck the motionless infantrymen with an almost physical impact.
Some of the knights and esquires may also have had to struggle with fear as they rode forward, locked into their places in the French line, like the men-at-arms described in the fourteenth-century The Vow of the Heron:
When we are in taverns, drinking strong wines, at our sides the ladies we desire, looking on, with their smooth throats. . . their grey eyes shining back with smiling beauty, Nature calls on us to have desiring hearts, to struggle, awaiting [their] thanks at the end. Then we could conquer… Oliver and Roland. But when we are in the field, on our galloping chargers, our shields ’round our necks and lances lowered … and our enemies are approaching us, then we would rather be deep in some cavern.
More, however, probably experienced emotions more like those described by Jean de Bueil in the fifteenth century:
It is a joyous thing, war. . . You love your comrade so much in war. . . A great sweet feeling of loyalty and of pity fills your heart on seeing your friend so valiantly exposing his body . . . And then you are prepared to go and live or die with him, and for love not to abandon him. And out of that, there arises such a delectation, that he who has not experienced it is not fit to say what delight is. Do you think that a man who does that fears death? Not at all, for he feels so strengthened, so elated, that he does not know where he is. Truly he is afraid of nothing.
Caught up both emotionally and physically in the onrush of their line, the French cavalrymen jumped the brooks in front of them at speed, then roared forward. Some stumbled and went down, for the ground was very muddy and criss-crossed with irrigation ditches and trench-naps dug by the Flemings. The horsemen drew nearer and nearer to a collision, accelerating to a gallop from about fifty yards out. When they saw that the line of infantry did not break, did not waver, some of the men-at-arms must have lost their nerve at the last minute, and tried to nun aside before impaling themselves and their hones. Formed as they were into a tight line, however, this would only have produced chaos, for turning aside meant running into their comrades next to them, and perhaps being struck by the second line coming up behind them. Others, confident to the last or simply beyond caring, pressed on until their mounts hit the pikes which the militiamen held with their butts firmly grounded in the earth. Some of the Flemings went down, pierced by a knight’s lance or trampled under a destriers metal-shod hooves, but with eight-deep files the fallen could rapidly be replaced and the line restored. The French charge collapsed into a jumbled mass of screaming horses, cursing men, spraying blood, and splintered wood.
After a period of confused melee, the militiamen went over to the attack They outnumbered the cavalrymen several times over, and still had their formation intact; the men-at-arms, on the other hand, were demoralized and had lost their cohesion and momentum. The Frenchmen were driven back, despite a counterattack by their reserve which almost succeeded in turning the tide of the battle. When the retreating horsemen backed up against banks of the brooks which they had crossed with some difficulty in their advance, their situation became desperate. Those who survived soon fled, followed by the panicked footmen of the Capetian host, who had no stomach to face the men who had just defeated their masters. The Flemings pursued on foot as best they could, striking down whatever fugitives they laid their hands on.
Over a thousand noble men-at-arms perished in this battle, ‘the glory of France made into dung and worms’, a proportion which would have been considered terribly high even in the American Civil War or the Great War, and which was absolutely stunning in an era more accustomed to the low casualties of battles like Bremule or Lincoln.
The large numbers of golden spurs that were collected from the French knights gave the battle its name; at least a thousand noble cavaliers were killed, some contemporary accounts placing the total casualties at over ten thousand dead and wounded. The French spurs were hung in the Church of Our Lady in Kortrijk to commemorate the victory, and were taken back by the French two years later after the Battle of Mons-en-Pévèle.
Some of the notable casualties:
* Robert II, Count of Artois, the French commander
* Raoul II of Clermont, Lord of Nesle, Constable of France
* Guy I of Clermont, Lord of Breteuil, Marshal of France
* Simon de Melun, Lord of La Loupe and Marcheville, Marshal of France
* John I of Ponthieu, Count of Aumale
* John of Trie, Count of Dammartin
* John II of Brienne, Count of Eu
* John d’Avesnes, Count of Ostrevant
* Godfrey of Brabant, Lord of Aarschot
* Jacques de Châtillon, Lord of Leuze
* Pierre de Flotte, Chief Advisor to Philip IV the Fair.
The battle is more important from the military than the political point of view; for it demonstrated that determined pikemen were more than a match for unsupported cavalry. In the Battle of Courtrai, the civic infantry militias of the allied communes, deployed in a dense, eight-deep formation, soundly defeated the King of France’s knightly army. In the following decades, in what was to become Switzerland, the peasant communities of three mountain and forest cantons defeated the German nobility’s attempt to subjugate them, an achievement that was, of course, facilitated by the nature of the landscape. The mountain people then allied with the city-states of the plain, and the Swiss mass infantry armies, fighting in dense formation, destroyed every knightly force that took the open field against them. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries these armies would go on to become the supreme infantry and terror of the European battlefields.
Barbara Tuchman describes this as a peasant uprising in A Distant Mirror. Though the winning army was well armed, the initial uprising was nonetheless a folk uprising. Eventually, however, the Flemish nobles did take their part in the battle — each of the Flemish leaders were of the nobility or descended from nobility, and some 400 of noble blood did fight on the Flemish side.
It represented the first major victory of infantry over mounted warriors since Adrianople, 1,000 years before.
