The English King of Ghent
This is part of a book I am preparing about the history of Belgium. If you like it, don’t hesitate to reach out (@simonnichelson on twitter) or recommend me to a publisher).
The English King Edward III stormed out of his tent, chasing after the Duke of Brabant. As the Duke mounted his horse, the King grabbed the reins. ‘I know Jacob is evil and wicked’, he said in a soothing voice, ‘but he is very useful and necessary for winning this war. Stay. Please.’
Jacob, that was Jacob Van Artevelde, the popular leader of Ghent. Moments before, one of the Duke’s knights had insulted Jacob during a military planning meeting in the King’s tent, telling him to ‘return to Ghent to make mead, because so much power didn’t belong in the hands of such a low-born man’. Before the eyes of the King and the Duke, Jacob had taken a battle axe and crushed the knight’s skull.
That evening, Edward III organised a big feast. The Duke of Brabant was forced to sit at the same table as Jacob of Artevelde, signalling their reconciliation for all to see. The weaver Jacob had murdered a nobleman in front of a Duke and a King, in the royal tent, and he got away with it. The King even threw him a party. Jacob personified the power of Ghent, and he felt untouchable.
Despite the turmoil of the early fourteenth century, the Flemish cities Ghent, Bruges and Ypres had continued to grow richer and more powerful. The Flemish Count and the French King lost their grip on the rich county. The Count ruled Flanders in name, but the true power lay with the Council of the Three Members of Flanders, composed of Ghent, Bruges and Ypres. More and more, the Flemish cities looked like the independent city-states of northern Italy.
The cities were ruled by factions of rich traders or members of the guilds. Particularly noteworthy was Ghent, where one leader ruled with an iron fist: Jacob Van Artevelde. He was a man of humble, but wealthy origins. Some sources claim that he started off as a brewer of mead, but he and his family made their fortune as cloth traders.
Van Artevelde rose to power in the first years of the Hundred Years’ War[ii]. When the war between France and England broke out, trade embargos between France (and thus Flanders) and England were declared. Once more, the English wool couldn’t reach the Flemish looms and an economic disaster loomed. The citizens of Ghent rose up against the firmly pro-French Count. During a Popular Assembly Van Artevelde took the word and convinced the audience that Ghent needed to negotiate a treaty with England. The assembly gobbled up his words and five days later, they elected him as the president of the five so-called head men, the leaders of the town.
Van Artevelde tried to keep Ghent out of the conflict between England and France by circumventing the embargo. He proved to be a skilled diplomat and brokered a deal with the English king Edward III. Ghent would remain neutral in the conflict on condition that the embargo was lifted. Edward duly agreed and soon, bales of fine English wool were once again being carted into the weavers’ ateliers. The Flemish cloth could hit the markets again. Van Artevelde’s masterly move had worked magnificently. He now held Flanders in the palm of his hand; the Count was reduced to his political puppet.
Like a true tyrant, Van Artevelde held on to power. He paraded through Ghent with an armed escort of 80 men, ordering them with a single gesture to kill anyone who opposed him. Others he would banish and seize half of their property, money he used to buy the loyalty of his followers. Romantic historians have called Van Artevelde loving nicknames such as ‘The Wise Man of Ghent’, but in truth, he ruled through violence against his opponents and through rewards for his cronies. He was half demagogue, half mob boss.
The support of Flanders was crucial for both Edward III and Philip of Valois. Artevelde exploited the Flemish neutrality to the maximum. The French King Philip practically begged the Flemish to stay loyal, erasing all of Flanders’ outstanding debt to the crown. At the same time, the superior French fleet tried to interrupt the wool supply, notably at the naval battle of Arnemuiden, the first naval battle recording the use of artillery. The French also successfully attacked several ports on the English south coast. The English King Edward III, from his side, sailed with a fleet of 400 ships to his allies in Brabant, mooring in a small but rapidly developing port, named Antwerp. Holland, Hainaut and Zeeland joined the English coalition as well. From Antwerp, Edward III continued his courtship of the Flemish, using the language the Flemish understand best until this day: money.
The anglophile Van Artevelde finally was lured into giving up Flemish neutrality. In December 1339, the powerless Flemish Count Louis of Nevers was forced to sign a treaty with Brabant, who already were an English ally. The Count realised that van Artevelde swung towards the English side and he secretly fled from Flanders to the French royal court. Van Artevelde, who had no official title outside of Ghent, was now the undisputed leader of Flanders.
The next month, the city councils of Ghent, Bruges and Ypres gave up their neutrality and chose the English side in the war. And they did so in a way that was bound to get France’s attention. On the Friday Market square in Ghent, on the exact spot where a proud, romantic statue of Jacob Van Artevelde now point towards England, the cities of Flanders received Edward III, King of England, and recognized him as King of France. Edward promised Flanders to give back lands previously lost to the French, and something curious: the minting of a currency that would be valid in Flanders, France, England and Brabant. This — in modern terms — monetary union never saw the light of day, but it shows just how much the Flemish had only one thing on their mind: trade.
The recognition of Edward III as King of France by Ghent, Bruges and Ypres radicalized the conflict between England and France that had started three years before. Rather than a good-old-fashioned conflict over the English possessions in the south of France, the challenge to the French King Philip was now existential. At the time, nobody could have fathomed that it would take over a hundred years to decide this battle.
Flanders and Brabant were also fruitful ground for Edward III in a very different way. His wife Philippa of Hainaut gave birth to two sons here, close to the lands where she herself had been born. Lionel of Antwerp was born in Antwerp; John of Gaunt in Ghent. Years later, when John of Gaunt had reached adulthood, political adversaries spread — probably fabricated — rumours that his father wasn’t Edward III. Word had it that the English Queen had an affair with a butcher from Ghent during their stay in Flanders. If this were true, the butcher of Ghent could be considered as the founding father of a royal house, since John of Gaunt became Duke of Lancaster and later founded the royal House of Lancaster. His son, Henry IV, would become the first Lancaster King of England.
The first major military confrontation of the Hundred Years’ War took place on Flemish soil, or, to be more precise, on Flemish water. Five months after the coronation of Edward III by the citizens of Ghent, the French fleet had sailed out to enforce the trade embargo and to punish Flanders. They blocked access to the Flemish ports and Antwerp. Assisted by the Flemish pirate and smuggler John Crabbe, the English assembled a hotchpotch of refurbished mercantile ships. On paper, the outnumbered English fleet was no match for the French fleet of superior war ships. However, the English brought a new weapon to the continent: the longbow. The longbow had been used for the first time in the Scottish wars and presented a great threat: not only did it have a far greater reach then the French crossbows, the archers could also fire up to five times the numbers of arrows per minute. This innovation would determine much of the Hundred Years’ War.
The French had sailed into the bay at Sluys in order to block it for merchant traffic that supplied Bruges. In doing so, however, they had greatly reduced their manoeuvring space. The nimble English ships used pirate strategies and picked off the French ships one by one. Volley after volley of the fearsome long bow arrows rained down on the cornered French sailors. Some desperately tried to abandon ship and swim to the beach, but they either drowned or were killed by Flemish troops waiting on the beach.
The Battle of Sluys was a resounding English victory and is sometimes dubbed the ‘Trafalgar of the Middle Ages’. Most of the French fleet was destroyed or captured. The English even joked that the fish must be learning French now that they had so many French sailors to eat. At the French court, nobody had the guts to tell King Philip of the defeat, so it fell to the court jester who courageously quipped: ‘Sire, our knights are so much braver than the English! The English would never dare to jump into the sea dressed in full armour!’
The Battle of Sluys took the pressure of the Flemish ports and gave oxygen to the Flemish textile economy, but it didn’t translate into political gains for van Artevelde. As a land campaign beneath the walls of Tournai petered out — this is where Van Artevelde killed the knight from Brabant — a truce was reached between the two big powers, France and England. The Hundred Years’ War ground to a temporary halt and an uneasy peace returned.
Peace didn’t agree with van Artevelde. He had risen to power during times of crisis, and as soon as the crisis disappeared, his power waned. The pact between the three big Flemish cities Bruges, Ypres and Ghent fell apart. In Ghent, different factions competed for power. The fullers, who processed the wool for the Flemish cloth, demanded a raise. This would hack straight into the profit margins of the weavers, who angerly attacked the fullers. On the same market square where Edward III was received and recognized as King of France just years before, the weavers and the fullers cut each other’s throats and bashed each other’s skulls in. The weavers came out on top of the riots of ‘Evil Monday’, but unrest smouldered in the city. Soon afterwards, van Artevelde resigned as leader of Ghent, but because of his international prestige and his personal friendship with King Edward III, he stayed on in a diplomatic position for the city. Van Artevelde was losing his tight grasp on the city.
Two months later, Edward III invited Van Artevelde for a meeting in Sluys. There, he gave his old ally an ultimatum. The cities of Flanders had to pay homage to him as their liege lord[iii]. Edward III asked nothing less than the defection of Flanders to the English side. Van Artevelde agreed with the terms of the ultimatum, but when he announced the news in Ghent, its citizens were outraged. The dean of the weavers, the mightiest guild in the town, said he would have no part in this treason.
On the evening of the 17th of July 1345, an angry mob, led by the dean of the weavers, surrounded Van Artevelde’s house. They forced their way into the house and started to kill anyone inside. Van Artevelde tried to escape through a back door, but he was caught on the street, ‘beaten down, butchered and killed’[iv]. Jacob, the mead brewer, the commoner who had befriended kings, had nearly turned Flanders into a republic and had ruled as a dictator over the medieval city-state of Ghent, was no more.
Together with Van Artevelde, the experiment of the independent, self-governed city states of Flanders died. In 1346, the Flemish count Louis of Nevers died at the battle of Crécy, fighting along with the French nobility. By the beginning of 1349, his son, Louis of Male was accepted throughout Flanders and French authority was thus restored. But by that time, an even worse enemy was knocking at the gates of Europe.
[ii] , The Hundred Years’ War was in essence a succession war. In 1328, king Charles IV of France had died childless. Philip of Valois was the candidate of the French nobility. He was the nephew of the Charles IV. Another candidate, however, had an equally strong (or stronger) claim. Edward III, king of England, was the grandson of Charles IV’s father.
[iii] Quoted in Nicholas, D. Medieval Flanders, p. 223.
[iv] Bourgeouis de Valenciennes, Quoted in De Maessschalk, E. De Graven van Vlaanderen, p. 457.
