On 7 August 1479, near Guinegate, the army of Maximilian of Austria, husband of the Burgundian heiress Mary, met a French army of King Louis XI under Philippe de Crèvecœur, lord des Cordes, which had come to relieve Thérouanne. The French cavalry broke Maximilian's horse and chased part of it toward Aire, but his Flemish pikemen, led by the counts of Romont and Nassau, held their ground, and Maximilian kept the field. The two contemporary accounts disagree about the cost: the Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet counts ten thousand French dead, while Louis XI's counselor Philippe de Commynes says Maximilian lost more. The historian Hans Delbrück called the battle a military turning point.
Battle of Guinegate
7 August 1479 · 547 years ago
The Burgundian inheritance
Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, died at Nancy in 1477. His daughter and heir, Mary, married Maximilian of Austria in Ghent in August 1477. Hermann Wiesflecker, in the Neue Deutsche Biographie, writes that Maximilian defended the unity of the Burgundian lands in a fifteen-year war of succession against France, and calls Guinegate its first decisive victory.1
Molinet writes that as a truce ran out in July 1479, Maximilian left Saint-Omer on 25 July, then camped before Thérouanne and made a show of besieging it. Commynes writes that the lord des Cordes, the king's lieutenant in Picardy, gathered the king's army in that province and on the frontier, with eight thousand francs-archers, to relieve the town; Maximilian raised the siege and went to meet him at Guinegate. Maximilian was only 20 years old, write Delbrück and the historian M. Krasoń. Molinet notes that des Cordes, Philippe de Crèvecœur, a knight of the Golden Fleece, had been raised from his youth in the house of Burgundy with Duke Charles, and now drew up his army against "son naturel prince", his natural prince (our translation).2
Two armies, many counts
Molinet estimates Maximilian's host at 27,400 combatants, not counting the forces of the prince of Orange and the count of Chimay, but says he had only 825 lances; he gives the French 22 standards, 1,800 lances and 14,000 francs-archers. Commynes gives Maximilian twenty thousand men or more from Flanders, a few Germans and about three hundred English, and the king some eleven hundred men-at-arms of his standing companies; the king's horse, he writes, far outnumbered the duke's. Delbrück credits Maximilian with no fewer than 11,000 foot with pikes and halberds and judges his army some thousands stronger than the French. Hermann Klaje, in an 1890 study of the battle, estimates about 24,000 to 25,000 French against Maximilian's 27,000.3
Cavalry and pikes
Molinet writes that the battle began after two o'clock. Delbrück describes Maximilian's pikemen in two deep blocks, under Count Engelbert of Nassau and the count of Romont, a veteran of Charles the Bold's wars against the Swiss; the sources, he writes, credit Romont with drawing them up in the Swiss manner.4
The French horse broke Maximilian's cavalry. Commynes says it chased them, with their commander Philip of Ravenstein, as far as Aire, and that des Cordes himself joined the pursuit, though "it is not the duty of any commanding officer to follow the pursuit", in Andrew Scoble's translation. Molinet adds that Ravenstein, in a mantle of cloth of gold, was taken for the duke, and that he came back to the battle with the fugitives he gathered. The French also took the Burgundian guns and turned them on their owners, write Molinet and Delbrück.5
The pike blocks held. "The Flemings were so well trained and practised with staves and pikes that [the French] did not dare to thrust in among them, but wheeled away and went back in confusion," Molinet writes; "that day there was no Frenchman bold enough to dislodge or shake them" (our translation). In his account Romont then retook the guns and pressed on into the French camp. Commynes, too, says the duke's foot did not flee, though shaken, because a good two hundred gentlemen of quality were with them on foot, leading them, Romont and Nassau among them.6
Maximilian himself, according to Delbrück, who follows Jean Dadizeele's memoirs and a Flemish chronicle, stood on foot among the pikemen, spear in hand. Commynes says only that the duke joined his infantry.7
Plunder and a rebuke
Behind the lines the chroniclers differ. Commynes writes that the king's francs-archers fell to plundering the duke's wagons and sutlers, until some of the duke's foot fell on them and killed a number of them. Molinet has three hundred French lances charge the duke's train and kill sutlers, priests, women with child, pages, lepers and infants at the breast.8
Afterwards, Molinet writes, des Cordes, out of favor with the king, called together the captains of the nearby garrisons who had fought that day, some of whom had blamed him, and told them: "if you had done as good a duty against the men of war as you did against the sutlers, priests, lepers and women with child, which is a great inhumanity and a perpetual scandal to the king, you would have won the battle" (our translation).9
Counting the cost
Molinet lists among the French dead named captains and "six to seven thousand francs-archers and others in good number; and the whole sum came to ten thousand fighting men" (our translation). On Maximilian's side he names a few lords killed, "with about a hundred men-at-arms, six hundred sutlers, among them thirty priests, six lepers, women and little children" (our translation).10
Commynes says the opposite: on the duke's side, he writes, "there was more loss than on ours, in men taken and dead; but the field remained his" (our translation). He adds, in Andrew Scoble's translation: "I speak of this battle only by hearsay, for I was not present at it". Klaje puts the total French loss at 10,000 men and Maximilian's at probably 5,000 dead and wounded, among them 1,600 killed in the camp.11
The date is Molinet's own: no battle within living memory, he writes, lasted longer without anyone knowing who would win than "this battle named above, called Quinnegate, which was on the seventh day of August" 1479 (our translation). Delbrück, Pirenne and Wiesflecker give 7 August 1479.12
A barren victory
Commynes believed that had Maximilian turned straight back to Thérouanne, he would have found not a soul in it, nor in Arras, but he did not dare. Delbrück, who calls it unexplained, writes that Maximilian instead gave up the campaign and dismissed his army. "La victoire de Guinegate resta stérile", the victory of Guinegate remained barren, writes the historian Henri Pirenne (our translation).13
Commynes was with Louis XI when the news came. The king, he writes, was very grieved, then, once he knew the truth, ordered that no such thing be undertaken without his knowledge, and resolved to make peace with the duke of Austria, provided it was wholly to his advantage. Commynes says the king was "très content de monseigneur des Cordes", well pleased with des Cordes (our translation); Molinet says des Cordes was badly out of the king's favor.14
On the Burgundian side, Olivier de La Marche gives the battle one sentence: Maximilian defeated the lord des Cordes before Guinegate, and many French were killed there.15
Delbrück judged that politically the battle gained no importance, "militärisch aber ist sie ein Wendepunkt", but militarily it is a turning point (our translation); the Netherlandish foot, he writes, were the forerunners of the Landsknechte, and the defeat pushed the French to reform their army. Wiesflecker writes that Landsknechte were first raised during the war of succession and that Maximilian trained them after the Swiss model. Krasoń argues that the defeat turned France away from large bodies of archers toward infantry with polearms.16
At Guinegate again, on 16 August 1513, Maximilian and Henry VIII of England defeated the French, write Pirenne and Wiesflecker. Scoble, in a note to Commynes, calls the 1513 battle on the same ground the battle of the Spurs.17
Smolensk operation, 1943: the Red Army breaks open the road west
7 August 1943 · 83 years ago
In the Smolensk and Bryansk regions, Red Army fronts opened a strategic offensive against German forces in World War II. Despite stubborn German defense, the Soviets broke through and freed cities including Smolensk and Roslavl, opening the way to plans for retaking Belarus.
Read the full story of Smolensk operation, 1943: the Red Army breaks open the road west ›Also on this day
1942: US Marines of the 1st Marine Division landed on Florida, Tulagi and Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. "The Japanese were taken by surprise; not one shot had been fired at the Amphibious Force," writes the Army's official historian. On Guadalcanal, where zero hour was 0910, the marines met no opposition on the beach. The Marine Corps historian John L. Zimmerman quotes the last message of the Japanese communication base on Tulagi: "Enemy troop strength is overwhelming, We will defend to the last man". The campaign is told in our article on the Battle of Guadalcanal.18
