It was a brief and
ill-starred alliance, ruinous to Flemish trade and abruptly ended by the fall
of Artevelde, whom his fellow-citizens tore limb from limb under the impression
that he was aiming at a tyranny (1345). But events soon justified the bold
proposals of the fallen statesman. In 1369 the heiress of the county was given
to a French prince of the blood; the French party in Flanders reared their heads;
Bruges, to the alarm and fury of all patriots, joined the foreign cause from
jealousy of Ghent. War broke out between the two great rivals; and the men of
Ghent, commanded by Philip, the son of Jacques van Artevelde, gained the upper
hand. Victorious in a pitched battle, they pursued the beaten army into Bruges,
massacred the partisans of France, and put the city to the sack. No other
commune dared to imitate the policy of Bruges, or to dispute the supremacy of
Ghent in Flanders.
The younger Artevelde, like his father before him, stood
out for a brief moment as the dictator of a league of free republics. But the
generals of France had profited by their hard experience in the wars with England;
at Roosebeke (1382) the men of Ghent, charging the French cavalry "like
wild boars," found themselves outflanked, and were crushed by the weight
of superior science and numbers. They fought with the fury of despair, neither
expecting nor receiving quarter. More than twenty thousand of the citizens fell
in the battle, and were left, by the King's order, unburied on the field. The
corpse of Artevelde, who had been suffocated in the press, was hanged on a
gibbet for a warning to all demagogues. With him died the day-dream of an
independent Flanders. Though her cities remained prosperous, they were
destined to be successively the subjects of the Burgundian, the Spaniard, and
the Austrian. It was only in 1831 that Flanders at length became a province in
a kingdom based on the Walloon nationality.Previous / First / Next Page of this Chapter
