Richard & John: Kings at War (75 page)

Three weeks after John’s return to La Rochelle, the allied army in the north at last got under way in its offensive against Philip Augustus. Otto, starting from Aachen, had taken an unconscionable time getting into the field, finally taking a route to Flanders through Maastricht, Nivelles (near modern Brussels) and Valenciennes in Hainault, where he met his confrères: Salisbury, the counts of Flanders and Boulogne and other notables, including the dukes of Brabant and Limburg, the lord of Mechelin and Hugh, count of Boves.
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There is no way of knowing the exact strength of the allied army, partly because medieval chroniclers routinely exaggerated numbers, but an ‘educated guess’ would put it around the 9,000-10,000 mark (at least 1,500 knights and 7,500 foot). Numerically the allied force had the advantage over Philip Augustus’s Frenchmen, who may have numbered only 7,500 - roughly the same number of knights but only some 6,000 infantry. But Philip’s military reforms, albeit partial, had made his army a more professional force, and his urban battalions were a particular innovation.
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The sources are somewhat confused, for some speak of the French as having 2,000 knights and 2,000 other warriors. Roughly speaking, though, the French had the edge in cavalry and the allies in infantry.
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Motivation on both sides was high, for Philip, menaced on two fronts, was fighting to save France while for Otto this was the last chance to regain the imperial throne.

Philip had several other advantages: by the time the allied army made its move, he knew he was secure on the southern front and could concentrate all his energies against Otto, and he enjoyed the secret services of the duke of Brabant, a spy at the very heart of allied decision-making. On the other hand, the much-touted idea that he harboured a military genius in the shape of bishop Guérin de Glapion has recently run into strong criticism as an absurd exaggeration.
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Philip’s initial strategy was to march into Flanders and cut off the Anglo-Poitevin force under William, earl of Salisbury whose subsidies were the sinews of war, but he was too late; by the time he marched, Salisbury and the Flemish lords had already met Otto. Then he attempted to take the enemy by surprise from the north, but when the allies marched south the two armies ended up passing each other in the night, both now with extended lines of communication in danger of being cut. On the evening of 26 July, learning that the enemy was at Mortagne, and there was no suitable ground near there for giving battle, Philip held a council of war at which it was decided to retreat at least as far as Lille, about twenty miles away. From Tournai Philip turned back west towards Lille, Douai and Cambrai, trying to stretch the allies on the rack, hoping that either the ramshackle alliance would disintegrate through personality clashes or that John’s subsidies would run dry.
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When Otto’s scouts brought him this news, the foolish ex-emperor thought it indicated a panic retreat like John’s from La Roche-aux-Moines and set off in pursuit. Absurdly overconfident he told his men in a rousing battle speech that the allied knights outnumbered their French counterparts three to one. Only Renaud de Dammartin, by far the best military mind in the allied camp, urged caution, but for this he was roundly berated by Hugh, comte de Boves, who accused him of cowardice.
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Philip’s army, marching with carts over flat land and in fine weather, set a blistering pace of about four miles an hour. Confident that a Christian enemy would not attack on a Sunday, Philip ordered his men to cross the River Marque at the bridge by the village of Bouvines, and settled down to a picnic lunch on the far side, with the rear column of his force still strung out over about two miles to the east of the bridge. Otto, though, was equally confident he could cut the enemy off before they reached the bridge and marched his men at the double; yet by the time he made contact with the French most were already on the other side of the river. As the imperial troops began rushing into the fields on the eastern side of the Bouvines bridge ‘like a plague of locusts’,
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a running fight developed with the French rearguard, which was forced to turn around and beat off attacks from Otto’s vanguard. Bishop Guérin de Glapion, bringing up the rearguard and half-blinded by the whorls of dust thrown up by the onrushing Germans, realised Otto meant business when he saw Otto’s banner of the golden eagle and dragon being unfurled.
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He quickly sent word to Philip, who at once grasped the gravity of the situation. With commendable presence of mind, he ordered his army to traipse back across the bridge and form battle stations with the river at their back. With amazing rapidity the French took up position. Philip just had time for a short speech of exhortation, pointing out that the enemy were largely excommunicate heathens; why else would they choose to fight a battle on a Sunday?
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Philip seized the initiative by taking his cavalry back across the bridge to aid the hard-pressed viscount of Melun in the rearguard.
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In some ways this was the critical action in the entire battle, for if Philip had not maintained presence of mind, a massacre of the French might have ensued. More and more horsemen appeared, including Guérin who, prohibited by canon law from shedding blood, neatly solved that conundrum by going into battle wielding a mace. Philip drew up his forces in three divisions. On the right were the men of the rearguard who were already battle-scarred, grouped around bishop Guérin and the duke of Burgundy, supported by the levies of the great French counts: Beaumont, Montmorency, St-Pol, Melun and Sancerre. The king himself commanded the centre and clustered around him most of the crack corps, including his household knights and redoubtable warriors like William de Barres, famous from the Third Crusade.
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On his left he placed his kinfolk, the lords of Dreux, including the bishop of Beauvais, and the counts of Dreux, Ponthieu and Auxerre. Opposite him, commanding the allied centre was Otto, still fuming that his scouts had told him Philip was in full retreat, in company with the dukes of Brabant, Louvain and Limburg; on his left were Ferrand and the count of Holland and on the right most of the men with a true martial reputation, as for example Salisbury, renowned for his physical strength and Hugh de Boves, infamous for his cruelty.
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With the numerical disadvantage, Philip was forced to weaken his left by extending it to prevent outflanking, but otherwise his ground was well chosen: his right was protected by marshy ground - particularly boggy this Sunday afternoon as the wet winter and spring of 1214 had exacerbated the basic wetland problem (the Rivers Escaut, Scarpe, Deule and Marque all drained here) - and in front of him was a mile-wide plateau suitable for cavalry charges. His men fought with their backs to the river, which meant there was no escape route in case of defeat; to reinforce the point Philip destroyed the Bouvines bridge once his men had crossed back over.
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Finally, and not unimportantly, the allies were forced to fight with the sun in their eyes.

A lesser commander might have thrown all the cavalry at the enemy before they were properly formed up, but Philip could see the danger that his horse might be sucked into a melee beyond infantry protection and then cut down piecemeal. Guérin used the cavalry initially to harass the enemy as if deployed off the road and onto the battlefield in a confused and time-consuming manoeuvre but this move was checked by Flemish cavalry screening the situation. It may have been as late as three in the afternoon when the first real clashes took place. The battle began more as a gigantic joust, with knights on either side performing heroically if inconsequentially. First the French sent forward their non-knightly cavalry force, which the Flemings beat back with ease.
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Bishop Guérin next tried to group the French knights together for a charge but this was beaten off by the Flemish horsemen, who responded by issuing individual man-to-man challenges to the French, as though to imply that a massed cavalry charge was against the laws of chivalry.
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French grandees named as performing doughtily in these actions were the count of Beaumont, Duke Odo of Burgundy, the viscount of Melun, Matthew of Montmorency and the count of St-Pol, who claimed to be utterly exhausted by his efforts; his enemies whispered that he was secretly in Otto’s pay.
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This stage of the battle petered out when the leader of the Flemish horse was killed in such an encounter. Meanwhile Philip was greatly encouraged when his men seemed to be having the upper hand in the weakest sector, the French left. Already the French were acting more as a coordinated force and the imperial army as a number of separate contingents.
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Seeing the allies making little progress, Otto ignored his obvious option - outflanking the French left - and ordered his cavalry to charge at Philip’s standard, sending his infantry forward at a run to take care of the French foot. The fighting was bloody and furious, with the infantry using long slender knives to try to pierce the knights’ armour; an unlucky Frenchman, Stephen of Longchamp, died when such a knife thrust through the eyehole of his helmet and pierced his brain. Eustace of Melenghin, a Flemish knight, was another killed in this way. French infantrymen surrounded him. One man grabbed his head, holding it between his arm and chest, pulled off his helmet and exposed him to the thrusts of his comrade, who knifed him under the chin. These tactics were initially successful, and the imperial infantry had the upper hand in the slugging match on the ground but Philip cleverly withdrew his horse in face of the initial impact, regrouped, then launched them in a counter-attack.
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The climax of this stage of the battle came when a large force of German infantry, armed with spears, iron hooks and long curved knives, crashed into Philip’s division grouped around the royal golden fleur-de-lis standard. Furious fighting followed, during which Philip was unhorsed and would have been killed had an enemy lance not been absorbed by his heavy armour. One of his knights, Peter Tristan, jumped off his horse and covered the king with his body until more and more French knights arrived, slaughtering the lightly armoured German foot. Gradually the French forced the Germans back, but not without taking heavy casualties. Losses among the French knights were especially severe as the enemy continued to use their long thin three-bladed knives designed to slice through gaps in armour.
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The sanguinary mayhem in the centre was effectively ended when the bishop of Beauvais, seeing the French left unexpectedly free to manoeuvre, ordered it to roll back the supporting action from the allied right. The Germans had almost succeeded in breaking the French cavalry and they failed only because their attacks were uncoordinated. One scholar indeed suggests that the action around Philip’s standard was a battle within a battle, that this encounter took place at the southern end of the battlefield while a general melee was being fought to the north.
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After the great allied effort in the centre, the pulse seemed to go out of their attack. The bishop of Beauvais had a surprisingly easy time of it when dealing with the allied right, doubtless helped by his good fortune when he clubbed down Salisbury, allegedly the strongest man on the field, with a mace.
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When Salisbury was captured, his back-up Hugh de Boves, who had taunted Renaud de Dammartin with cowardice, turned and fled. Ironically, it was the man de Boves had accused of cowardice who displayed the greatest military talent that day. Early in the battle Renaud had used the very effective device of drawing up his 700 pikemen into a circular formation - a primitive square - from which cavalry would emerge for sudden charges before retiring once more into the protective fold.
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As the fight in the centre became more intense and Otto called for every last cavalryman, this tactic had to be modified. Suddenly the struggle in the centre was over. The key event was the unhorsing of Otto himself. A French knight grabbed at the bridle of his horse, while another lunged at him with a knife. The first blow rebounded off the emperor’s heavy armour, but a second pierced the eye of Otto’s rearing horse; maddened with pain the steed bolted carrying Otto with it before collapsing. The great French knight William de Barres came within an ace of capturing Otto after he was unhorsed. Unhinged by this calamity, Otto lost his nerve and fled.
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His flight demoralised the imperial troops, who soon began to disengage and stream away off the battlefield. Soon the gallant Renaud and his pikemen were left to fight on alone. Although French troubadours ungallantly jeered that Renaud resisted and would not surrender only because he feared prison would be the end of his life of amatory dalliance, the truth is that he fought on courageously, his squares still bristling like porcupines, defying the French cavalry to approach them. Freed of anxiety in the centre, Philip ordered his infantry and archers to make an end of the defence. Sheer weight of numbers told; the French knights, their blood up, scythed down the Flemish pikemen to the last man, as knights were wont to do in battle with their social inferiors. Renaud was cut down and his life spared only by the rapid intervention of bishop Guérin.
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