Golden Spurs: How the Weavers of Flanders Broke the Flower of French Chivalry

On the morning of 11 July 1302, the weavers and fullers of Flanders did something no one believed possible: they destroyed the finest cavalry army in Europe.The Battle of the Golden Spurs is one of the most consequential and least understood engagements of the medieval world. When the guild militias of Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres faced the flower of French chivalry on a flat plain outside Kortrijk, the outcome was supposed to be swift and brutal. Instead, it became one of history's great military upsets — and the beginning of a transformation in how European wars were fought.The Golden Spurs is the definitive narrative account of how it happened and what it meant. Drawing on the full range of medieval chronicle sources and the best of modern scholarship, Theobald Darcy reconstructs the wool trade that made Flanders ungovernable, the French occupation that made revolution inevitable, the guild organization that made the militia possible, and the specific tactics that made the morning of 11 July 1302 decisive. He then traces the battle's extraordinary afterlife: the punitive peace, the peasant revolts, the spurs removed from the church in 1382, and the romantic mythology that a nineteenth-century novelist transformed into the founding story of a modern people.History this rich deserves to be told whole.