The Story of Bruges

by Ernest Gilliat-Smith

When they reached Oedelem, in the neighbourhood of Maele Castle, Philippe sent envoys to Bruges to make one last effort to negotiate an honourable peace, but the guildsmen remembered their bloody triumph of two years ago, and boasted that in less than an hour they could easily cut to pieces this puny band of Ghenters; and presently Louis, at the head of eight hundred knights and forty thousand tradesmen—tailors, butchers, fishmongers and the like—unarmed and half drunk, in spite of his better judgment was compelled to go forth to battle. With such an auxiliary force behind him the issue was a foregone conclusion. At the first discharge of their opponents’ artillery, the drunken rabble made for Bruges. The Ghenters gave chase, and ran so swiftly that they reached the city gates almost at the same moment as the men they were pursuing; one of the foremost of them was in time to thrust his pike between the doors at the moment the Bruges men were closing them, and soon Van Artevelde and his comrades were thronging into the city.

Louis, who had been unhorsed at the commencement of the stampede, had somehow or other managed to remount, and along with some thirty or forty knights had the good fortune to reach his palace in safety. From thence he sent out heralds to summon all his burghers under pain of death to assemble in the market-place. Hardly had he done so when Robert Maerschalck, the husband of one of his natural daughters, came in hot haste to the palace with tidings that Van Artevelde was now in the heart of the city. Night had already set in, and his counsellors, trembling for the safety of his person, would have had him remain indoors, but Louis refused, and accompanied by a handful of serving men, and crying, ’Flandre au comte au lion,’ rushed out into the darkness. When he reached the Grande Place he knew that his cause was lost. It was filled indeed with armed men, but it was not the burghers of Bruges who had assembled there. Flaunting over the seething throng, he could distinguish the banner of Ghent. ‘Put out your lights,’ hissed the Count to his lackeys, ‘and let each man think of himself.’ Alone, under cover of the darkness and a buttress of St. Amand’s Church—long since demolished—he unbuckled his coat of mail and put on the clothes of one of his serving-men.

About midnight he summoned up courage to knock at the door of a wretched hovel hard-by, and recognizing in the person who opened it a poor widow to whom he had often given alms, appealed to her generosity. ‘Woman,’ he whispered, ‘save me; I am the Count of Flanders.’ She pointed to a rickety ladder, and bade him go up to the garret. There, under a heap of straw, he lay all that night and all the next day. When darkness had again set in he made his way out of the city, and, after a host of hairbreadth adventures, presently reached Lille. ‘Now mark,’ comments wise old Froissart, ‘all ye who hear this tale, consider what marvellous changes of fortune God in His good pleasure bringeth about. In the morning the Count of Flanders had thought himself one of the mightiest princes in Christendom, and in the evening he found it convenient to hide himself in the mean home of a poverty-stricken woman.’

As for Van Artevelde, he treated the conquered town with no little generosity. By the small hours of the morning he had completely gained the upper hand, and his first act was to forbid further slaughter, and all looting, and every kind of outrage under penalty of death. He next summoned the burghers of Bruges to a conference in the Grande Place. Hardly had they assembled than a member of Van Artevelde’s own family was led bound into his presence. He had been taken red-handed in some act of violence. ‘What,’ exclaimed the great tribune, ‘you, who should have been a pattern of obedience, the first to break my commands!’ and he ordered that he should be flung headlong from one of the windows of the belfry. As he fell some men-at-arms caught him on the points of their spears, and a cruel shout of approbation welled from the throats of the Bruges men—‘Behold a just judge, a man cut out for captain of Flanders!’ and they swore that henceforth the burghers of Bruges would live in brotherly love with the burghers of Ghent.

But Van Artevelde, knowing the men he had to deal with, required something more tangible than their bare word, and the burghers were compelled to deliver into his hands a goodly number of hostages; to witness the destruction of three city gates:—the Porte Ste. Croix, the Porte Ste. Cathérine and the Porte de Gand, and thirty feet of wall around each of them; and lastly, to submit themselves to the two Ghent captains, Peter Van den Bossche and Peter de Wintere, whom Artevelde appointed governors of the town. For the rest he contented himself with requisitioning an ample supply of provisions for the famine-stricken town of Ghent, and for three whole days the high road from Bruges to that city was crowded with carts and waggons groaning under the weight of food stuffs.

At the expiration of that time, thanks to the energy and prudence of Van Artevelde, the markets were peacefully re-opened, and the town assumed its wonted aspect. During his short rule—it only lasted six months—trade revived, justice was rigorously administered, and peace reigned throughout Flanders. Then came the French invasion, the Flemish defeat at Rosebeke, and the great tribune’s untimely death (November 27, 1382). The conquerors found his mangled body on the battlefield amongst a heap of slain, and they hung it in chains on a lofty tree, and the birds of the air devoured it.

Never had Flanders suffered a defeat so disastrous. ‘Sixty thousand of her sons had perished,[31] the land was deluged with blood.’[32] A blow had been hurled at communal government from which it never really recovered.

Thanks to the intervention of Louis of Maele, and his son-in-law the Duke of Burgundy, backed by the support of certain great nobles whose goodwill the burghers had purchased with heavy bribes, Bruges suffered less at the hands of the French than the other communes of Flanders. She was not handed over to pillage, but the Breton mercenaries, disappointed of the rich booty which they thought to have obtained there, scoured the country round with fire and sword. ‘The French,’ says the monk of St. Denis, ‘cut the throats of all whom they met, sparing neither rank, nor age, nor sex, and thus it may be truly said of them that they slew the widow and the orphan, the youth and the maid, the old man and the suckling at its mother’s breast.’ As for Louis of Maele, he approved what he could not prevent. ‘Some people ask, most redoubtable lord,’ said he to King Charles VI., ‘how may best be crushed the turbulent spirit of this race—by sparing the land or by reducing it to a desert. As for me, I can only say: deal with the county of Flanders according to thy good pleasure, and whatsoever thou shalt deem fit to ordain I shall be contented.’ In truth Louis’s influence in the counsels of the French King was almost a thing of the past, and what little influence he still possessed was diminishing day by day. The campaign against Flanders had, indeed, been undertaken ostensibly for his behoof, but its real object was to deal a blow at England and to shatter the forlorn hope—the Flemish communes—of the restive communes of France; and when two years later (January 26, 1384) a truce was concluded between Richard II. and Charles VI., what Louis deemed his interests were wholly disregarded. In spite of his opposition—on this King Richard had insisted—the communes of Flanders, who had not even laid down their arms, were included in the truce of Lelinghem.

An exile from the rich land which he had once tyrannized over and exploited—for Louis no longer dared show his face in Flanders—without influence and without means, literally a homeless, impotent, poverty-stricken old man, dependent for his daily bread on alms which France begrudged him, so mean a creature did the once magnificent Louis appear in the eyes of the Duke of Berri that during the discussion of the terms of truce he had not hesitated to answer his vehement protest with insolent and contemptuous speech. Cousin, he said, si votre imprudence vous a couvert de maux et de honte, il est temps de renoncer à vos fureurs et de suivre de meilleurs conseils.

Cut to the quick by the insult, and powerless to resent it, Louis did not wait for the negotiations to be terminated, but withdrew in dudgeon to St. Omer, and here it was that he presently learned that the treaty in question had been signed. It was the last straw. The hand of death was upon him, and he knew it.