When one speaks of the Renaissance, the military historian's first thought is that it was not only a Renaissance of art, learning, culture, and humanism, but a Renaissance of Infantry as well. A "Renaissance" in that the foot soldier regained most, if not all, of the battlefield superiority over the mounted man, that he had in the ancient world. When one speaks of this Renaissance of Infantry" one always thinks of the Tercios and the Landsknechts, and of course, pride of place must always go to the ferocious Swiss. Yet the intrepid Swiss mountaineers, mercenaries to all of Europe, were only the last, albeit The most spectacular example of the Renaissance of Infantry. One of the earlier attempts by infantry to assert itself, granted with less eventual success than the Swiss, was made by the Flemish Communes. The cities of Liege, Loos, Ghent, Ypres, Bruges, and Tournai, Courtrai, and Lille, had since the 13th century fielded "armies" composed of their own non-noble citizenry and led by an urbanized "gentry." These communal armies, while despised by the more noble elements of feudal society, were nevertheless useful, efficient, and powerful. They contributed to the military power of the Counts of Flanders and were especially useful in sieges and prolonged campaigns. [1] At the dawn of the 14th century, these towns of what we later came to call "the low countries" staged their most spectacular campaigns, resisting, and for a time, defeating the efforts of the French King to conquer them, shear them of their communal freedom, and bring to them the dubious blessings of French society. The origins of these Flemish communal armies have been explained negatively. The most common is that they arose because of the independence of the towns, an independence won not through arms but through trade. This trade caused a breakdown of the old feudal relationships and gave to the towns a corporate identity which formed the "cement" upon which the solidarity of the army was based. The chief exponent of this has been Henri Pirenne, who in his Early Democracies in the Low Countries claims that commerce was the driving force behind the origin and independence of these towns. Pirenne observes that all of these Flemish cities chief 'raison d'etre' was commerce. They arose at the end point of navigability of rivers, confluence of major roads, portages, or harbors. With the growth of trade the power of the traditional hierarchy of feudal or ecclesiastical overlords, based on the system of land tenure, was diminished and the lords themselves shut up in their inaccessible 'castra' were marginalized, and eventually evicted. What nobility remained became an urbanized elite, co-opted by commerce, and lost their ties and solidarities with their rural cousins. This thesis has been the "conventional wisdom" of historians for decades. Problems Yet there are problems with Pirenne's thesis. It begs the question "If in Flanders why not in Poland, or the Balkans, or in France?" Poland and the Balkans are even more a crossroads between Europe and Asia, even more a meeting place of world trade, than is Flanders or even Italy. A second problem has been posed by such writers as Carl Whitfogel in Oriental Despotism or William McNeil in The Pursuit of Power. Neither McNeil nor Whitfogel speak of Pirenne at all; either do they deal with the communes of Flanders. These writers pose models of development that cast grave doubt on the validity of Pirenne's thesis. Whitfogel sees the key to what he calls "Oriental Despotism" in the monopolization and control of the environment by an elite and the reduction of the rest of society to chattelage. That part of the environment under control is that which produces the food for the society, and by tying their persona intimately with it, ensure their own dominance. The theory is simple. Control the Nile and you control Egypt, control the Canals of the Tigris and Euphrates and you control Mesopotamia. Whitfogel and later McNeil then assert that this invokes a system of "command mobilization." Combined mobilization, according to Whitfogel, is where the rulers of the East, the "Oriental Despots", simply appropriate the resources of their subjects for their own use, with no recompense or quid-pro-quo. Government in the East, according to Whitfogel, is simply predatory, and the ruler, when he needs money or goods, simply goes out and "sacks" some cities. It doesn't matter to the despot if they are the cities of a neighboring kingdom, or his own. His subjects are there to be shorn, shaved, or slaughtered. McNeil seconds Whitfogel, and claims, that in the West, those kingdoms that were successful, namely England, France, and the Low Countries, did without command mobilization, whereas those that did not, like Spain, Portugal, and Turkey, lapsed into... well... oriental despotism. The difference for Whitfogel (who coined the term hydraulic empires) is that the environment in the west was less controllable, (there was not one central river system amid a wasteland. control of which gave god-like status), and for McNeil, because legal and political fragmentation prevented the use of command mobilization. Yet it must be remembered that even the those countries alleged not to have used "command mobilization", such as England, Holland, and France, it was not for lack of trying by the would-be "despots." The feudal nobility did not grant to the communes or the commons, or even their own noble vassals, anything that they were not forced to do by dire need or force-majeure. Nor, looking at the question from the other side, did the newly liberated communes or commons (or even nobility) extend these blessings of liberty to their fellows and certainly not to their subjects. Oaths given by these lords to respect "the commons" were given through clenched teeth, with every intention to revoke them and take revenge as soon as the prince had time and troops to do so. If the burghers and merchants of a town granted money to a duke, baron, or prince when he was in need of it, in return for liberties and concessions, they also knew that they would have to defend their newly won freedoms at the point of a sword. In most cases, it was only by defeating the prince on the battlefield, or in raising formidable walls from which the common tinkers could cock-snooks at their masters, that their freedoms were won. The vital point which even Pirenne is forced to briefly concede, but does not make too much of was that it was only the presence of walls, and the men to defend them that allowed the merchant his security. There are hundreds of examples of rich, prosperous towns which never attained the amount of independence and liberty that the towns of Italy or Flanders achieved, and this too throws serious doubt on Pirenne's thesis. If Pirenne's thesis was correct, and sufficient, then why, one might ask, did not Alexandria, Cairo, Baghdad, Samarkand, and Dehli throw off their despots. Granted, this may be travelling far afield, and one may object that these cities are outside of the European tradition, but then that would imply that there was something peculiarly "European" about the success of towns and the nature of liberty. No thinking person today can accept such abysmally primitive concepts of white-Eurocentrist racism. Yet the most telling argument against Pirenne's thesis is that the towns gained their freedom only when they possessed arms and lost it only when they gave up their arms and the willingness to use them. Yet even within the commune all was not well. In the 11th and 12th centuries they were democracies in name only, or only to the extent that they were not ruled by a feudal or ecclesiastical overlord. The great burghers of the towns, the "echevins;" concentrated the "franchise" within a very narrow circle of members, often less than a hundred, who exercised absolute and despotic control over the rest of the inhabitants of the town. The more common artisans and workers were systematically exploited, degraded, and dehumanized to a point that would have made a Simon Legree, Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Hilary Rodham Clinton, or any other oriental despot adamantly envious. Revolts The result was predictable - violent lower-class revolts, brutal vengeance, and systematic repression. Sometimes the commons won a measure of relief from their burdens; often, they did not. The degree to which they won the former was in direct proportion to the degree to which they exterminated the capitalist oppressors who had replaced the feudal oppressors. Freedom, it seems, is only possible through the personal appropriation of extreme violence. The plutocratic classes, in spite of the humble origins of their ancestors, soon adopted the overweening pride and arrogance, as well as many other of the worst vices of their quondam feudal masters, and were determined not to have done to them what they had done to others. They disarmed their own lower classes to prevent just this sort of revolt, little realizing, or perhaps, little caring, that it would mean the extinction of civil liberties. Yet by this time they had become so rich, and had intermarried with the traditional nobility, that their position was assured whichever regime was in power. Civil liberties to this class, had not only ceased to be a guarantee of their well-being and success, but had become an impediment to their further aggrandizement. It is not the purpose of this article to follow the ups and downs of lower-class revolt in the low countries. The bibliography that follows this article will be more then sufficient. What is of interest is how these communal armies operated on the battlefield. SOURCES Much of the information for this article, came from J.F. Verbruggen's The Art of Warfare in Western Europe During the Middle Ages. As might be expected from a book published by the North-Holland Publishing Company, it deals far more with the revolt in Flanders than other works, which chiefly give this struggle only passing mention. Yet Verbruggen's work is not myopically centered on Flanders. He gives thorough treatment to the other theaters as well. Especially valuable are Verbruggen's excellent maps of Courtrai and Mons-en-Pevele, on which I based my own renditions for the table top. I derived the map for the battle of Arques by using a modern topographical map of the area around St. Omer, and a map from an unpublished manuscript By John Coref, The Battle of Arques, 1969, which I found in the Upsala College Library in that year. I have been unable to locate it again, so as a source it is of dubious value. It was however difficult to square Verbruggen's description with the map in this manuscript. As the topography around St. Omer has changed somewhat, the modern map is also of only marginal value. My map therefore is a "best effort" attempt to reconstruct the battlefield. Especially troubling are the "watercourses" and the woods in which the French hid while waiting for the Flemings. I have been unable to locate any map of the Battle of Cassel, nor a detailed description of it. Much the same is true of Roosebeeke so the maps given are conjectural only. Sir Charles Oman's The Art of War in the Middle Ages contains some references to Courtrai, and is generally accepted to be the "conventional wisdom" on the Flemish revolt. Oman however, deals only summarily with the shortcomings of the Flemish system, and then in contrasting these with the English Longbow/Dismounted Man-at-Arms system. Here he betrays a certain nationalistic bias. My own opinion is that this "English" system was a "dead end" in military development, a "dead end" made all the more treacherous by the glittering victories, which I might point out, were achieved only with the almost willing compliance of a near imbecilic foe. The Flemings, I feel, were really on the right track, and had they not been betrayed and overwhelmed, might have gone on to found the first true "modern" country of Europe. More Flanders Flanders Introduction Flanders Revolt Battle of Courtrai: July 11, 1302 Battle of Arques: April 4, 1303 Battle of Mons-En-Pevele: August 18, 1304 Orders of Battle The Flemish Style of War and Bibliography Back to Table of Contents -- Courier #74 To Courier List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 by The Courier Publishing Company. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com