“were all bribed by gifts or promises from the King of France, who would never have dared to invade their frontiers, had they been faithful to their count.” Guy de Dampierre, hopelessly beaten, repaired, with two of his sons, and fifty-one of his faithful knights, to the camp of the Count of Valois, who gave him a kind reception, and urged him to trust himself to the king’s generosity, promising at the same time to support his suit. Guy set out for Paris with all his retinue. On approaching the City-palace which was the usual residence of the kings, he espied at one of the windows Queen Joan of Navarre, who took a supercilious pleasure in gazing upon the humiliation of the victim of defeat. Guy drooped his head, and gave no greeting. When he was close to the steps of the palace, he dismounted from his horse, and placed himself and all his following at the mercy of the king. The Count of Valois said a few words in his favor, but Philip, cutting his brother short, said, addressing himself to Guy, “I desire no peace with you, and if my brother has made any engagements with you, he had no right to do so.” And he had the Count of Flanders taken off immediately to Compiegne, “to a strong tower, such that all could see him,” and his comrades were distributed amongst several towns, where they were strictly guarded. The whole of Flanders submitted; and its principal towns, Ypres, Audenarde, Termonde, and Cassel, fell successively into the hands of the French. Three of the sons of Count Guy retired to Namur. The constable Raoul of Nesle “was lieutenant for the King of France in his newly-won country of Flanders.” Next year, in the month of May, 1301, Philip determined to pay his conquest a visit; and the queen, his wife, accompanied him. There is never any lack of galas for conquerors. After having passed in state through Tournai, Courtrai, Audenarde, and Ghent, the King and Queen of France made their entry into Bruges. All the houses were magnificently decorated; on platforms covered with the richest tapestry thronged the ladies of Bruges; there was nothing but haberdashery and precious stones. Such an array of fine dresses, jewels, and riches, excited a woman’s jealousy in the Queen of France: “There is none but queens,” quoth she, “to be seen in Bruges; I had thought that there was none but I who had a right to royal state.” But the people of Bruges remained dumb; and their silence scared Philip the Handsome, who vainly attempted to attract a concourse of people about him by the proclamation of brilliant jousts. “These galas,” says the historian Villani, who was going through Flanders at this very time, “were the last whereof the French knew aught in our time, for Fortune, who till then had shown such favor to the King of France, on a sudden turned her wheel, and the cause thereof lay in the unrighteous captivity of the innocent maid of Flanders, and in the treason whereof the Count of Flanders and his sons had been the victims.” There were causes, however, for this new turn of events of a more general and more profound character than the personal woes of Flemish princes. James de Chiltillon, the governor assigned by Philip the Handsome to Flanders, was a greedy oppressor of it; the municipal authorities whom the victories or the gold of Philip had demoralized became the objects of popular hatred; and there was an outburst of violent sedition. A simple weaver, obscure, poor, undersized, and one-eyed, but valiant, and eloquent in his Flemish tongue, one Peter Deconing, became the leader of revolt in Bruges; accomplices flocked to him from nearly all the towns of Flanders; and he found allies amongst their neighbors. In 1302 war again broke out; but it was no longer a war between Philip the Handsome and Guy de Dampierre: it was a war between the Flemish communes and their foreign oppressors. Everywhere resounded the cry of insurrection: “Our bucklers and our friends for the lion of Flanders! Death to all Walloons!” “Philip the Handsome precipitately levied an army of sixty thousand men,” says Villani, “and gave the command of it to Count Robert of Artois, the hero of Furnes. The forces of the Flemings amounted to no more than twenty thousand fighting men. The two armies met near Courtrai. The French chivalry were full of ardor and confidence; and the Italian archers in their service began the attack with some success. My lord,” said one of his knights to the Count of Artois, “these knaves will do so well that they will gain the honor of the day; and, if they alone put an end to the war, what will be left for the noblesse to do?” “Attack, then!” answered the prince. Two grand attacks succeeded one another; the first under the orders of the Constable Raoul of Nesle, the second under those of the Count of Artois in person. After two hours’ fighting, both failed against the fiery national passion of the Flemish communes, and the two French leaders, the Constable and the Count of Artois, were left, both of them, lying on the field of battle amidst twelve or fifteen thousand of their dead. “I yield me! I yield me!” cried the Count of Artois; but, “We understand not thy lingo,” ironically answered in their own tongue the Flemings who surrounded him; and he was forthwith put to the sword. Too late to save him galloped up a noble ally of the insurgents, Guy of Namur. “From the top of the towers of our monastery,” says the Abbot of St. Martin’s of Tournai, “we could see the French flying over the roads, across fields and through hedges, in such numbers that the sight must have been seen to be believed. There were in the outskirts of our town and in the neighboring villages, so vast a multitude of knights and men-at-arms tormented with hunger, that it was a matter horrible to see. They gave their arms to get bread.”
A French knight, covered with wounds, whose name has remained unknown, hastily scratched a few words upon a scrap of parchment dyed with blood; and that was the first account Philip the Handsome received of the battle of Courtrai, which was fought and lost on the 11th of July, 1302.
The news of this great defeat of the French spread rapidly throughout Europe, and filled with joy all those who were hostile to or jealous of Philip the Handsome. The Flemings celebrated their victory with splendor, and rewarded with bounteous gifts their burgher heroes, Peter Deconing amongst others, and those of their neighbors who had brought them aid. Philip, greatly affected and a little alarmed, sent for his prisoner, the aged Guy de Dampierre, and loaded him with reproaches, as if he had to thank him for the calamity; and, forthwith levying a fresh army, “as numerous,” say the chroniclers, “as the grains of sand on the borders of the sea from Propontis to the Ocean,” he took up a position at Arras, and even advanced quite close to Douai; but he was of those in whom obstinacy does not extinguish prudence, and who, persevering all the while in their purposes, have wit to understand the difficulties and clangers of them. Instead of immediately resuming the war, he entered into negotiations with the Flemings; and their envoys met him in a ruined church beneath the walls of Douai. John of Chalons, one of Philip’s envoys, demanded, in his name, that the king should be recognized as lord of all Flanders, and authorized to punish the insurrection of Bruges, with a promise, however, to spare the lives of all who had taken part in it. “How!” said a Fleming, Baldwin de Paperode; “our lives would be left us, but only after our goods had been pillaged and our limbs subjected to every torture!” “Sir Castellan,” answered John of Chalons, “why speak you so? A choice must needs be made; for the king is determined to lose his crown rather than not be avenged.” Another Fleming, John de Renesse, who, leaning on the broken altar, had hitherto kept silence, cried, “Since so it is, let answer be made to the king that we be come hither to fight him, and not to deliver up to him our fellow-citizens;” and the Flemish envoys withdrew. Still Philip did not give up negotiating, for the purpose of gaining time and of letting the edge wear off the Flemings’ confidence. He returned to Paris, fetched Guy de Dampierre from the tower of the Louvre, and charged him to go and negotiate peace under a promise of returning to his prison if he were unsuccessful. Guy, respected as he was throughout Flanders on account of his age and his long misfortunes, failed in his attempt, and, faithful to his word, went back and submitted himself to the power of Philip. “I am so old,” said he to his friends, “that I am ready to die whensoever it shall please God.” And he did die, on the 7th of March, 1304, in the prison of Compiegne, to which he had been transferred. Philip, all the while pushing forward his preparations for war, continued to make protestation of pacific intentions. The Flemish communes desired the peace necessary for the prosperity of their commerce; but patriotic anxieties wrestled with material interests. A burgher of Ghent was quietly fishing on the banks of the Scheldt, when an old man acosted him, saying sharply, “Knowest thou not, then, that the king is assembling all his armies? It is time the Ghentese shook off their sloth; the lion of Flanders must no longer slumber.” In the spring of 1304, the cry of war resounded everywhere. Philip had laid an impost extraordinary upon all real property in
